A Study Guide for Wallace Stevens 's "Anecdote of the Jar"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Wallace Stevens 's "Anecdote of the Jar," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535818308

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Anecdote of the Jar

Wallace Stevens

1919

Introduction

Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens is a deceptively simple poem. The anecdote—about the disposition of a plain jar and its effect on the interplay of the speaker's consciousness and the topography of the environment—is composed of a series of grammatically straightforward sentences expressing odd content. The poem uses a vocabulary equally simple, yet Anecdote of the Jar is a poem of considerable interpretive difficulty because its apparent simplicity and off-kilter content suggest a meaning beyond the series of declarative sentences.

The modernism of the poem, the combination of its uncomplicated form and puzzling, if not hidden, content, reflects the artistic spirit of the time in which it was written. Such contraction—an apparent rebellion against the grandeur, egoism, and sentiment that characterized the art of the nineteenth century—sought to reveal the inner subjectivity of art and consciousness rather than the outer objectivity of the world. This new aesthetic was the dominant force in music and painting as well as literature during the first decades of the twentieth century.

The nursery-rhyme rhythm and simplicity of the poem, along with the complexity of its elusive meaning, its surreal imagery and perspective, and its apparent dedication to the primacy of the language of a poem rather than what the language signifies, have made it a representative example of early-twentieth-century sensibility. It is a poem that challenges interpretation, proffering itself as a commentary, among other possibilities, on the tension between art and nature, on the role of the poet in fashioning our idea about how reality is ordered or organized, and about the role of consciousness in determining the nature of reality.

Anecdote of the Jar can be found in The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, edited by Holly Stevens (1990).

Author Biography

Stevens was born on October 2, 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania. His father was a lawyer, and his mother, who bore five children, was a pious Presbyterian woman. After attending the