부산대학교 도서관

Twentieth century poetry has been variously characterized as romantic, antiromantic, impersonal, highly personal, chaotic, orderly, classical, symbolist, wholly untraditional, reasoned and measured, or incomprehensible—depending on the critic whom one reads. This radical diversity suggests a fundamental problem with poetry in the twentieth century: It has no clear path to follow. Finding previous poetry inadequate to deal with the situation in which they find themselves, modern poets must create anew, must, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “find out what will suffice.” The modern poem is an act of exploration. In the absence of givens, it must carve out its own niche, make its own raison d’être.