Today’s Poem: Anecdote of the Jar

Wallace Stevens is worth it

Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, 1910 (Academia.edu)

---

Anecdote of the Jar

by Wallace Stevens

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 1919 “Anecdote of the Jar” can be taken in many ways. It’s about industrialization destroying the last old wildernesses. Or, in its putative argument with Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” it’s about the distance of American poets from their European origins. In its twisted final two lines, the poem is revealed to be about the disjunction of language and reality. Or maybe it’s an account of how male objects intrude on the female Mother Nature and claim dominion (a feminist reading that seems to me a little willful, given that a canning jar probably suggests something more yonic than phallic). Perhaps the poem is just a still-life. Or a commentary on the making of art.

In truth, there so many ways to read the brief twelve-line poem that the temptation is just to dismiss it — the ambiguities so relentless that Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) has let them dissolve into incoherence: It’s just not a poem that repays attempts to understand it.

Much comes down to the question of whether we trust the poet and poem. I don’t mean “trust the poet” entirely in the sense of “someone who wrote good poems,” which Stevens did. We’ve already looked at “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” and “The Snow Man,” and as Stevens increasingly comes out of copyright, we will do more. But good poets can publish bad poems (see, ad passim, Auden, W.H.). I mean “trust the poet” in the sense that the skill displayed in a particular poem — the command of diction, form, and pacing; the intelligence of the parts we do get — suggests a poet sufficiently in command that we should trust the poem enough to invest the time needed to decide how we will take that poem. (An example might be the reading we did of Hart Crane’s difficult “At Melville’s Tomb.”)

As it happens, I do trust Wallace Stevens. He’s the high-modernist poet most fascinated by formal logic, as with the illicit conversion — “All X is Y, therefore All Y is X; All music is feeling, therefore All feeling is music” — he puts at the center of “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” Or the strange grammar of the nothing he develops in “The Snow Man.” And, more to point, Stevens comes toward the top of the group of poets, the high modernists, I take as accurate reporters and analysts of the thin modern world: How do we live within it? How do find meaning in a universe without inherent meaning? They are witnesses of the cold disease, the diagnosticians and occasionally the physicians who propose a treatment.

So if we wanted to trust the Stevens poem, we’d notice its mostly tetrameter quatrains and its consistent inversions of ordinary sense: The opening stanza claims that the man-made jar isn’t placed in a surrounding wilderness but makes the wilderness surround it, as though the coherent jar creates the incoherence elsewhere. And from there the poem builds to the difficult double negative of the last lines, the human jar that “did not give . . . / Like nothing else,” contrasted with Tennessee’s wild birds and bush. The grammatical constructions, too, are strange. We get poetic inversions: “round it was,” “of a port in air.” We get jarringly obvious internal rhyme: “sprawled around” a jar “round upon the ground.” We then arrive at flat non-poetic diction: “The jar was gray and bare.” Even the self-diminishing word “anecdote” in the title.

All that, I think, is sufficient evidence that Stevens is in charge enough for the reader to invest in the poem. And what I find when I invest the time — the working center of the poem — is a human object that organizes the surrounding landscape that “sprawled around, no longer wild.” The jar “took dominion everywhere,” and the scholar Roy Harvey Pearce has offered the wonderfully attractive (if not actually helpful) observation that Stevens had in mind a particular brand of canning jar, the Dominion Wide E Special, distributed in the U.S. since 1913.

A Dominion canning jar (Etsy)

The sense that I take from this is the diagnostic modern observation that the human is the only remaining source of meaning. We inherit poetic language that points to a prior thickness, but now what gives meaning is “gray and bare,” and perhaps more to the point, sterile: “It did not give of bird or bush,” entirely unlike everything else in the fertile landscape it organizes.

We could push here into the interplay of imagination and reality that Stevens develops in The Necessary Angel, and it may be a related analysis, for that artistic question uncovers a contrast that cannot be solved but, at most, balanced briefly.

“Anecdote of the Jar” allows us to condemn the human dominion of modernity. It simultaneously allows us to endorse the modern view as the true apprehension of reality, uncovered once modernity had swept away the superstitions and deceits of the old premodern world. The diagnostician is not assuming the mantle of the physician. He just tells us what is so.

---

---