Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens
"Anecdote of the Jar" by Wallace Stevens is a short lyric poem consisting of three stanzas that examines the interplay between art and nature. The poem begins with the speaker placing a glass jar on a Tennessee hill, an act that symbolizes artistic creation devoid of inherent purpose. As the poem progresses, it reflects on how the jar's presence transforms the surrounding wilderness, suggesting that art can impose order on the natural world. The use of simple, everyday language combined with an irregular rhythm creates a contrast between the simplistic and the profound, highlighting the themes of control and dominance. The jar, described as "gray and bare," paradoxically gains power over the chaotic wilderness, illustrating the complex relationship between human artistry and nature. Stevens’s exploration invites readers to consider the implications of artistic intervention in the natural environment, leaving their interpretations open-ended and thought-provoking. Through this piece, Stevens challenges conventional notions of beauty and meaning, prompting reflection on the role of art in shaping our understanding of the world.
On this Page
Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens
First published: 1919; collected in Harmonium, 1923
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” is a short lyric poem of three four-line stanzas that explore certain aspects of the relationship between art and the natural world. Although the lines have no definite, formal meter they are generally iambic with four stresses per line. With few exceptions, the words used in the poem are all commonplace and monosyllabic, allowing Stevens to employ at key points a variety of hammer-stroke rhythms for emphasis. The appearance at intervals of those words that are more than one syllable (“slovenly,” “wilderness,” and “dominion,” for example) help emphasize the poem’s dominant theme, the gulf between art and nature in the contrast between the short and “natural” words and the longer and “artistic” words. While there is no formal rhyming scheme to the poem, Stevens’s characteristic skill with sounds, in particular consonants in the middle of words and the repetition of key words, helps link the piece together as well as further emphasizes the difference between “nature” and “art” or “artifice.”
Ostensibly, “Anecdote of the Jar” is a straightforward, even simple, account of a commonplace action by the unnamed speaker, presumably Stevens himself. The speaker of the poem places a glass jar on the side of a hill in Tennessee. No reason is given for this action (as one shall see, the action of placing the jar is symbolic of artistic creation, which has no “reason” in the natural sense). Furthermore, this action takes place in the first line of “Anecdote of the Jar”; the rest of the poem is a reflection on what it means to have set the jar in the middle of the woods and what the jar’s presence means for the poet, his readers, and the entire natural world.
In the first stanza, Stevens uses the verb “placed” to describe his action with the jar. What the speaker does with the jar is not an idle, unreflective deed but rather a conscious act; indeed, it is symbolic of artistic creation, and in a sense it is itself an artistic action. By the fact that it has so been placed, the jar, an artificial object, immediately affects the “slovenly wilderness,” first by causing the wilderness to “surround that hill” and then, in the second stanza, forcing that wilderness to become “no longer wild.” By the third and final stanza the jar has assumed control of the entire natural landscape (“It took dominion everywhere”) and has in fact supplanted the natural landscape, the artificial world imposing its ideals of order and aesthetics on nature itself. Significantly, the jar “surrounds” and “takes dominion everywhere” without visible motion or activity but simply by the fact of its presence, its mere existence as counterpart and counterpoint to the natural world.
Forms and Devices
Known for the originality and individuality of his syntax and vocabulary, Stevens frequently teases his readers with a lexicon that seems commonplace but that, upon closer inspection, refuses to yield a single unambiguous meaning. At the same time, he often places these placidly baffling word choices within lines of deceptively straightforward narrative. In “Anecdote of the Jar” he presents the reader with a series of simple, declarative sentences whose individual words and overall meaning, while generally clear, can be difficult to unravel.
As previously noted, the action of the poem is deceptively simple: The poet places a glass jar on the side of a Tennessee hill. Then, however, the poem calmly informs readers that the jar assumes some sort of control over the wilderness, paradoxically taming it. Apparently the jar can accomplish this because it was “round upon the ground/ And tall and of a port in air.” The internal rhyme of “round” and “ground” reinforces the concept of the jar (or a poem) as a conscious work of human artistry, an artificial creation that draws attention to its nature by the almost doggerel nature of the rhymes. As an artifact the poem is linked to the jar, which is also a creation of human beings.
Each created object is in some way capable of at least some control over nature. So much is clear: Art is a way of imposing order and meaning to a natural world that otherwise lies outside one’s powers. However, Stevens’s full meaning in the phrase “tall and of a port in air” is suggestive but tantalizingly unclear. Is the “port” here that similar to a harbor where ships (artificially constructed objects) and human beings can find refuge against nature’s storms and tides? Or is the jar, made of glass and open at one end, being compared to a portal (such as the “port hole” of a ship) that allows passage from one world to another? Here, as elsewhere, Stevens’s poem initially states what seems to be a plain fact, which upon closer reflection sees its meanings dissolve into a puzzle of contradictions.
By the final stanza these deceptively simple statements have elevated the jar’s status to that far beyond what is realistically possible. It “took dominion everywhere” paradoxically because it was dull (“The jar was gray and bare”) and lifeless (“It did not give of bird or bush”). These attributes, which would seem to weaken and diffuse the jar’s mysterious power, actually are the source of its strength and order-imposing capability.
Bibliography
Bates, Milton J. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003.
Cleghorn, Angus J. Wallace Stevens’ Poetics: The Neglected Rhetoric. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
Critchley, Simon. Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Ford, Sara J. Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens: The Performance of Modern Consciousness. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Leggett, B. J. Late Stevens: The Final Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
Morse, Samuel F. Wallace Stevens: Poetry as Life. New York: Pegasus, 1970.
Santilli, Kristine S. Poetic Gesture: Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Sharpe, Tony. Wallace Stevens: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.