The title of Wallace Stevens's "Of Modern Poetry" suggests his purpose: poetry as part of Modernist literature. For, this poem is a clear example of Modernist thinking. As clarification of this thinking, one can refer to T.S. Eliot's remarks about James Joyce's Ulysses:
It is simply a way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.
In his poem, Wallace Stevens declares that the poetry of the mind must find "what will suffice" for the individual, who lives in the "theatre" of the world that has changed.--"It has to construct a new stage." "With meditation" the poem must
speak words in the ear....that whichi it wants to hear at the sound/Of which an invisible audience listens,/not to the play, but to itself.
The poet's ideas expressed in "Of Modern Poetry" are very much in keeping with Modernist thought. The individual, "the poem of the mind" must make order out of what Eliot has called "the immense panorama of futility." The simple, orderly acts of the individual are important in an orderless universe because they are all that give meaning to his/her existence.
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