Anecdote of Men by the Thousands

"Anecdote of Men by the Thousands" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published previous to 1923 and is therefore in the public domain, according to Librivox. [http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4077] Stevens recognized that his poems were a visible expression of (an invisible element of) his North American place. This would remain true even if the poet were to succeed in overcoming locality, as Crispin attempts to do in "The Comedian as the Letter C". The opening stanza is a dramatic statement about the soul's being composed of the external world, an idea approached philosophically by American philosophers like Charles Peirce. [ "Apsychologist cuts out a lobe of my brain ("nihil animale a me alienum puto") and then, when I find I cannot express myself, he says, 'Yousee, your faculty of language was localized in that lobe.' No doubt itwas, and so, if he had filched my inkstand, I should not have beenable to continue my discussion until I had got another. Yea, the verythoughts would not come to me. So my faculty of discussion is equallylocalized in my inkstand." [Peirce, "Collected Papers" 7.366] .] Compare Theory.

The following lines of the poem are anticipatory assertions, and then two leading questions, and finally a blossoming of the poem's idea in the image of a woman of Lhassa.

Notes

References

• Peirce, C.S. "Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce", vols. 7–8, Arthur W. Burks (ed.). 1958: Harvard University Press.