In "Of Modern Poetry," a poem first published in 1942, Wallace Stevens sets forth the dilemma of the poet in the modern world:

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

Until sometime in the eighteenth century, around the time of the French Revolution perhaps, poets lived in a world where the existence of absolute values and of a providential order in the cosmos was all but universally accepted. It was only with the romantics that the individual imagination was invoked as a sanction for the values and order that men needed to live their lives, when the world had ceased to supply such a sanction. Such is the real distinction between the...