Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Blackbird

Antonio José Jiménez Muñoz

Ed. by Erik Martiny, Paris Science et Lettres
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1923

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poetry (any)

Resources

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Recommended Reading

One of the most perplexing and elusive poems in Wallace Stevens’

Harmonium

(1923), “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” has often been noted to allude “humorously to the Cubists’ practice of incorporating into unity and stasis a number of possible views of the subject observed over a span of time” (Buttel, 1967, p. 165). Whether in fact humorously or not, the poem is certainly intellectually amusing; it revolves around separate visual moments in which the subject – one or more blackbirds – is present in increasingly idiosyncratic ways. It was first published in 1917 in a breakthrough anthology which also promoted the works of T.S. Eliot, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams (Kreymborg, 1917), and stressed the role of the visual in poetry…

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1774 words

Citation: Jiménez Muñoz, Antonio José. "Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Blackbird". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 March 2013 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8282, accessed 16 April 2024.]

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