384 Making It New: 1900–1945of their creator in being tentative, provisional, and unfinished. In some respects,
Stevens’s poems resemble Poe’s. “Pure” or closed poems in a way, they are as self-
sufficient and intangible as the realms of experience they describe; they seem to
exist in their own special dimension or, as Stevens himself put it in Notes, “beyond
the compass of change / Perceived in a final atmosphere.” In other respects, though,
they edge out tentatively toward the boundaries of experience just as Dickinson’s
poetry does. “Impure” or open poems of a kind, they tend to emphasize their own
arbitrariness, to offer themselves up to reinvention – and so remind us that they are
(to quote “The Man With the Blue Guitar”) “inconstant objects of inconstant cause /
In a universe of inconstancy.”
Just how Stevens manages to walk this tightrope between open and closed
structures is illustrated by poems like “Anecdote of the Jar” (1923) or “Thirteen Ways
of Looking at a Blackbird” (1923). Both pieces work through repetition and echo, a
series of significant if often subterranean connections. This repetitive pattern
becomes far more elaborate in some of the longer, more sustained pieces, with the
result that poems like, say, “The Idea of Order at Key West” resemble mosaics, in
which the poet seems to be trying to construct his own personal version of the
imaginative fictions he celebrates. Complex designs of word, sound, and image, they
offer the reader a special world, in this case a verbal one, which may be abstracted
from and so depend upon our given surroundings – but which has its own innate
structure and system of cross-reference. Both “Anecdote of the Jar” and “Thirteen
Ways” adopt a seriocomic, slyly evasive tone, too. Here as in, say, “Bantams in
Pinewoods” (1923) or “Le Monocle de Mon Uncle” (1923), the poet uses wit and
irony to qualify and complicate matters, and so prevent the reader from coming
to too simple or final a conclusion. And both are written in such a way as to seem
complete and incomplete, so imitating in their form, as well as describing in their
content, the continuing act of the imagination by which worlds are created that
are sufficient in themselves and yet subject to alteration. The section that concludes
“Thirteen Ways,” for instance, describes a moment of absolute stillness: a scene in
which “It was snowing / And it was going to snow,” where the blackbird has become
a still point. Everything appears to be at rest, complete and sufficient within itself,
until the reader remembers that, for Stevens, winter, the season of snow, was a
beginning as well as an end. The section concludes “Thirteen Ways,” certainly. But by
reminding us of the process of decreation – what Stevens called, in one of his letters,
“getting rid of the paint to get at the world itself ” – it also acts as a prelude to further
imaginative activity, an opening to poems as yet to be written.
It would be wrong, however, to dwell on “Thirteen Ways” as if it summed up the
whole of Stevens’s work, even in its paradoxes and ambiguities. No one poem could
do that. One reason is that the later poetry is, on the whole, less spry and balletic
than the earlier – more meditative and austere, more discursive and openly philo-
sophical. And another is that Stevens rarely allowed himself to be contained by a
particular idiom even within the space of one poem. Each of his pieces is complexly
layered, moving almost casually and without warning between high rhetoric and
the colloquial, book-words, foreign borrowings, and native slang. As a result, eachGGray_c04.indd 384ray_c 04 .indd 384 8 8/1/2011 7:53:53 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 53 AM