Poem of the Day: Wallace Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar"

Anecdote of the Jar
(published 1919 in Stevens’ first collection, Harmonium.)










Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.


The appeal, or lack of it, in this much-anthologized Wallace Stevens poem has always interested me. I offer it now because it seems a good November (or early March) poem. Although it’s rather theoretical or symbolic, it also makes sense on the literal level: there’s no foliage to block the view of a jar placed upon a hill. So the jar’s centrality in the scene has at least a bit more plausibility than it might in seasons of full leaf or snow covered mountains.

If memory serves, my first reaction years ago, at age nineteen, went something like this: “How un-pretty this language is. Even the poet calls it a mere anecdote. As for theory, what a lot of bunk. One jar sucks up a wilderness? All those trees, branches, snakes, worms, bugs, birds. Surely not.”

Or here I was, holding forth: “I’m nineteen, and I’m just starting to get dunked in this poetry business, which is also philosophy biz, and I want nature to win. In fact, I’m on the Wordsworth team, and I agree with him that nature has already won, will always win, even as it stoops, bothering to bless and teach us, rather than rubbing our noses in our insignificance. Only some arrogant yappers out there don’t see and smell their smallness. Why, I’m pretty sure I feel the ‘correspondent breeze’ flowing through my shirt, even as we speak.”

Oh, yes, that’s precisely what I said one March day while traipsing across a ridge in southeastern Ohio.

So who was this impenetrable, unmusical, cerebral shell of a Connecticut insurance guy named Stevens, this mere American, telling Anglophile me—and my Wordsworth!—about some banal jar’s “dominion”?

At least Keats’s version of the story (in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”) had the courtesy to elevate the jar to the loftiness of “urn,” which he connected to immortality. The wise, tragic Keats would never think to set a jar in competition with a mountain, then claim that some plain old cylinder of glass or clay had actually won—a jar with no carvings, nothing else special, shrank mountains, brambles and skunks, put ‘em in their place. I think not.

And Keats had the judgment to keep his peculiar admiration for jars and art in the parlor, a small room where art belongs, along with his quaint notions about art as your taxi to eternity.

I said all that too, verbatim, out loud, right to Nature—the one woman who might listen. (Easy, now). I meant it, but I also wanted to remain in Her good graces. It was clear that She was bigger than I was. And artsy jars? Not so much. I could smash them and corporate Wallace Stevens with one youthful, manly sneeze.

Now, decades hence, I haven’t done a complete reversal. If I want peace, I go to nature--or some convenient, suburban variation on nature--a Metro Park. But nature is often too hot or too cold, rainy, muddy, full of mosquitoes.

And, can there be any doubt that if I see a jar in the wilderness, I’ll focus on it, even a plain old canning jar, homely, man-made thing? The eye must go to something. It might focus on a bobcat, but I’ve seen a lot more jars than bobcats, even on hillsides, in the form of litter and illegal dumping.

One jar—not dozens in a pile of roadside junk, which doesn’t count—one jar "placed" upon a hill in Tennessee? That would be the different thing and the man-made thing that would draw my merely human attention. Maybe I’d be embarrassed to call it kin or confess its “dominion,” but I hope I’d be honest enough to admit the truth: I’m at least as connected to it as I am to the trees. As the lone and different thing on the hillside, the jar makes me see it, along with a new fact or two.

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