Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), an important American modernist poet, was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, studied at Harvard University, and graduated from New York Law School. He worked as a lawyer in New York and became vice president of one of the largest insurance companies in Hartford, Connecticut. In addition to being a successful businessman, Stevens is considered one of the great poets of the twentieth century. His poetry collections include Harmonium (1923), The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Poems (1937), A Primitive like an Orb (1948), and Transport to Summer (1947). Collected Poems (1954) brought Stevens both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Stevens’s work is often described as meditative and philosophical. He was a poet of ideas, with a strong belief in the poet as someone with heightened powers. Stevens favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language, rejecting the sentiment favored by the Romantic and the Victorian poets.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
With its haiku-like austerity and abstract form, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” has been associated with the cubist painters, such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, whose work depicted subjects from many viewpoints by breaking them up and reassembling them in an abstract form.
I
Among twenty snowy mountains
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
5
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whistled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
10
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
15
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
20
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
25
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
30
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
35
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
40
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
45
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
50
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
(1917)