Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.

Stevens frames poetry not as the delivery of clear propositions but as an exploratory act aimed at what resists explanation. The “inexplicable” suggests experiences—beauty, terror, transcendence, the felt texture of reality—that cannot be fully captured by logic or ordinary description. In this view, a poem is less a solution than a disciplined pursuit: it circles, tests, and reimagines the world through metaphor, sound, and form, approaching meaning asymptotically. The line also aligns with Stevens’s modernist emphasis on imagination as a way of engaging reality: poetry becomes a method for encountering mystery without reducing it, preserving the pressure of the unknown as a source of aesthetic and intellectual vitality.