‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’: Stevens’s Cubist Narrative

Abstract

A title like ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ (1917) invites us away from the world of doing into the world of beholding. Stevens wished to emphasize the contemplation of reality, not reality itself. The blackbird is something of an x factor whose identity changes in relation to the speaker’s mood and context. As the title and insistence on verbs of looking, knowing, and seeing stress, the poem is about what we know and how we know it. Each stanza brings the blackbird into relation with the mind. The speaker is like a surveyor using the blackbird as an instrument to measure the geography of the mind. From the outset, the play on ‘eye’ and T – introduced in the last line of Stanza I and the first line of Stanza II – emphasizes the stress on one person looking. We might think of ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ as both a poem and a theory of poetry. As Robert Morris has remarked, ‘From the origins of such terms as “theory” (from theoria – to look at) and “idea” (from idein – to see) to Plato’s metaphor of the cave, the visual is both privileged and concealed in language.’¹ Within the poem is a dialogic debate between diverse possibilities of American poetry. Implicity enacted in the poem are the following positions: