When we say that poetry is modern we mean two things. First, that it is a new poetry, one which stands in opposition to poetry which has come before it and receives much of its creative impetus from its flouting the attitudes implicit in the old poetry. This is what we may call the absolute sense of the word modern. Donne, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Whitman were modern poets. The author of "The Comedian as the Letter C" is modern in this sense. He blames some of the failures of the present on the fictions of the past, fictions which seem to him caricatures of the meaning they once possessed. But he is also modern in the second sense of the word, the historical sense. Stevens' poetry is characteristic of recent times, the past fifty years. It is concerned with the breakdown of belief, the moral wasteland, the pressures of materialistic realties on the life of the imagination. Twentieth-century poetry
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