Thoughts on THE FIGURE OF THE YOUTH AS VIRILE POET by Wallace Stevens

As readers of poetry, we often struggle with the seemingly unanswerable question: What is poetry.

It's the sort of question that stops us dead in our tracks. We may think we know the answer, then inevitably someone asks it. That's when you realize that you have no idea.

The good thing is that no one really does.

In Wallace Steven's essay The Figure of the Youth as the Virile Poet, Stevens addresses this question, among other notions and misconceptions surrounding poetry.

A bulk of the essay deals with the differentiation between poetry and philosophy. From one perspective, they seem to be the same. Both work towards a higher reality. They are some dreamt up idea expressed in a way as to draw others to the same conclusion. Philosophy is truth over reason. Poetry is the same, but goes a step further.

Philosophy satisfies reason or imagination. It can rarely combine the two. Poetry however epitomizes both. It is a creative expression of truth. Good poetry satisfies both reason and imagination.

Another interesting topic brought up in the essay is the egocentric nature of poetry. The poet is ever present in his or her work. This is, in Steven's opinion, what makes poetry timeless. Philosophy changes and evolves with the poet. It is expanded upon, proven wrong, proven correct, fine tuned and manipulated until new philosophy becomes old philosophy and even newer versions take hold. Poetry, however, is the perfect expression of the poet's reality. It can't get any better. At least it can't be expanded upon. It simply is what it is in that moment, and it's permanence depends not on its perfection but on its level of connectivity. Stevens addresses this topic again when explaining the downsides of metaphysical poetry. The extremely abstract genre does not really allow for connectivity, and the poet is less connected. If the connection is present, it is intangible and thus subconsciously frustrating for the reader. In many cases, these are the poems that do not stay. The connection is not there. If engagement with the imagination is the aim of a poem, there still must be some level of connectivity, which is a fact often forgotten by metaphysic poets.

Steven's point in this essay is not to define poetry. In fact he argues that this is a fruitless ambition. What can, however, be defined is what makes a poem successful.