Anecdote of the Jar

"Anecdote of the Jar" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1919, so it is in the public domain. [Buttel, p. 166. See also Librivox [http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4077] and the Poetry web site. [http://www.poetrymagazine.org/search_author.html?query=6576] ]

This famous, much-anthologized poem succinctly accommodates a remarkable number of different and plausible interpretations, as Jacqueline Brogan observes in a discussion of how she teaches it to her students. [Brogan, p. 58] It can be approached from a New Critical perspective as a poem about writing poetry and making art generally. From a poststructuralist perspective the poem is concerned with temporal and linguistic disjunction, especially in the convoluted syntax of the last two lines. A feminist perspective reveals a poem concerned with male dominance over a traditionally feminized landscape. A cultural critic might find a sense of industrial imperialism. Brogan concludes: "When the debate gets particularly intense, I introduce Roy Harvey Pearce's discovery of the Dominion canning jars (a picture [ [http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Stevens/jar.gifIllustration] ] of which is then passed around)." [Brogan, p. 59]

Buttel suggests that the speaker would arrange the wild landscape into the order of a still life, and though his success is qualified, art and imagination do at least impose an idea of order on the sprawling reality.

Helen Vendler, in a reading that contradicts Brogan's and Buttel's, asserts that the poem is incomprehensible except as understood as a commentary on Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn", alluding to it as a way of discussing the predicament of the American artist, "who cannot feel confidently the possessor, as Keats felt, of the Western cultural tradition." [Vendler, p. 45.] Shall he use language imported from Europe ("of a port in air", "to give of"), or "plain American that cats and dogs can read" (as Marianne Moore put it), like "The jar was round upon the ground"? [Vendler, p. 45.] The poem is a palinode, retracting the Keatsian conceits of "Sunday Morning" and vowing "to stop imitating Keats and seek a native American language that will not take the wild out of the wilderness." [Vendler, p. 46]

Media

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Notes

References

• Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught. "Introducing Stevens: Or, the Sheerly Playful and the Display of Theory." In "Teaching Wallace Stevens", ed. John Serio and B. Leggett. 1994: University of Tennessee Press.
• Buttel, Robert. "Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium". 1967: Princeton University Press.
• Vendler, Helen." Words Chosen Out of Desire". 1984: University of Tennessee Press.