Lines 1-10: "The poem of the mind in the act of finding" through "It has / To construct a new stage."
Summary
These lines, roughly the first half of the poem, primarily describe the need for modern poetry to differentiate itself as a modern, contemporary form. The first sentence alerts readers to Stevens' focus on the mind: modern poetry should be poetry of and for the mind—specifically, the mind in the process of finding meaning or substance in life. This vital commandment to poetry is reinforced by the following lines' assertion that poetry's task is now harder than it used to be. Poetry, or the human mind, has not always had to look so hard for meaning: "the scene was set," meaning, probably, that the world was familiar, and "it repeated" the established conventions of thought, writing, language, etc. In other words, poetry used to have a formula to follow.
The dramatic break midway through line four demonstrates the shift from old poetry to modern poetry: the literary scene has changed, the poem tells us, "To something else." We are left wondering what exactly it has changed to—but finding an answer to that question is the point of the poem. Stanza one ends by firmly casting off the prior legacy of poetry as a "souvenir."
The first lines of the much longer second stanza explain that poetry needs to be "living," evolving, and engaged with real people and events. This includes, for Stevens, being using colloquial language—"learn the speech of the place"—and interacting with real people around him. Poetry must also "think about war"—this broad statement is left up for interpretation as to how one can write about war—and in so doing continue the search for meaning in life ("what will suffice"). The poem then repeats the theatrical metaphor of "the theatre was changed" by saying that poetry must "construct a new stage." This new stage will be the new genre of modern poetry.
Analysis
Perhaps the most striking thing about these lines, especially for Stevens, is how direct they are. The speaker is leaving little room for ambivalence, and rather being very clear about what he believes poetry must do. For a Modernist master to write this style of poetic manifesto halfway through his career indicates probably that Stevens felt a need to refocus the blurry picture of the 'modern poetry' movement and issue to poets a renewed call to action. "Finding / What will suffice" is poetry's distinct goal, as stated here, and the poet goes on to outline exactly what is necessary to achieve that goal with remarkable assertiveness. As Helen Vendler puts it, "The Stevens who earlier luxuriated in dialectical speculation now prefers the blind assertions of a desperate necessity." One way this shift can be described is from passivity to action: poets can no longer idly await inspiration, but must "act"—a crucial word in the first line that is easily overlooked—must go out and face the world in their work.
The usage of theater as an extended metaphor or stand-in for poetry is an interesting one: it indicates that Stevens saw something performative and public about poetry. This language enhances the sense of duty in the poem, that poets are figuratively on a stage with great power to speak to the nation—or, if the stage does not exist, they must "construct" it so that their voices may be heard. The poem also pays noticeable attention to humanity as a whole: "men" and "women" are presented as general, equivalent groups of people who are all worthy of poetic study. Critic Jacuqline Vaught Brogan comments that men and women are brought together here as "equal representative of humanity," a noticeably egalitarian tone for Stevens' usually highly masculine poetic persona.
The form of these opening parts of the poem, unrhymed free verse, is remarkably sparse. The lines also use heavy enjambment—meaning that sentences or phrases carry over across the line breaks—and the line endings are often weak words, such as "had," "what," "meet," and "has." The effect is that the emphasis is taken off of sound and rhythm, and the sense of the lines flows almost like prose. Enjambment also prevents the anaphora of "It has to," "It has to," etc. from all aligning visually at the start of every line, the visual drama of which could risk distracting the reader from the words' actual meanings. This form allows these strong commands to fall with a lighter touch and come across as simple truths. On a meta-textual level, these opening lines 'construct the stage' for the rest of the poem to build on, by laying out the ground rules for poetry.
