Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: Historical & Literary Context

Imagism

Imagism was a short-lived avant-garde poetry movement that lasted, roughly, from 1914 to 1917. Important figures in this movement included Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (who published as H.D.), and William Carlos Williams. By the early twentieth century, these and other poets had grown weary of the sentimentality and artifice that characterized the previous century’s poetry. They therefore explored a new kind of verse that emphasized economy of language and directness of presentation. Key to this new form of poetry was a radical simplification of subject matter and scope. Instead of pursuing ambitious themes about love, life, death, and everything in between, these experimental poets sought to focus on a single image—or scene, or experience—and reveal something essential about it. This focus on a single image gave birth to the new movement’s name: Imagism. Although Wallace Stevens didn’t participate directly in this movement, he did develop an acquaintance with William Carlos Williams in the 1910s. Furthermore, like Ezra Pound, Stevens developed an interest in Japanese visual art, the minimalism of which bore a strong connection to the imagistic haiku poetic form. These influences are all present in the precision Stevens brings to “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

Theories of Perception

As a work that centers different “ways of looking,” it’s essential to situate Stevens’s poem in relation to key theories of perception. Perhaps the most influential theory of perception in Stevens’s own time emerged from the field of Gestalt psychology. Gestalt (geh-SHTUHLT) is a German word that refers to something that is made of many parts, but which is more than the mere sum of those parts. Gestalt psychology sought to understood perception as just such a sum, rather than as the result of individual sensations. According to this idea, perception is made possible by an organizing principle of the mind that functions by distinguishing an object from its context. It’s only by isolating “figure” from “ground” that we can perceive things as distinct entities, and this figure–ground dynamic constitutes the “Gestalt” of Gestalt psychology. Another theory of perception that’s relevant to Stevens’s poem is rather more ancient, having been written around 380 BCE. In The Republic, the Greek philosopher Plato penned a tale about people who gaze at shadows cast on the wall of a cave, all the while believing that these shadows are reality. Plato’s tale serves as an allegory for the profundity of our misperception of the world.