Parts of a World

About this book

In Parts of a World, Wallace Stevens writing frequently adopts a solipsistic perspective in exemplifying and explicating his definition of poetry. Such poems as “Prelude to Objects,” “Add This to Rhetoric,” and “Of Modern Poetry” all address, to some extent, the self-referential nature of poetry. In “Of Modern Poetry” Stevens defined the genre as “the finding of a satisfaction, and may / Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman / Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.”