With the publication of his 1923 debut, Harmonium, Wallace Stevens announced the arrival of a new poetic talent with a gift for indelible imagery and a penchant for memorable phrases. Both talents are on display in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” a poem from the debut collection that has since become one of Stevens’s best-known works. As suggested by its title, the poem consists of thirteen individual stanzas, each of which features a distinct point of view that somehow incorporates a blackbird. These stanzas are numbered sequentially with Roman numerals, though they do not present a linear narrative or argument. Instead, each stanza offers a standalone vignette. Some of the stanzas depict blackbirds in natural environments, perched in a tree or sailing on a gust of wind. In other stanzas, blackbirds appear in less literal ways—sometimes through similes, sometimes as “shadows,” and sometimes as mere figments of the imagination. Regardless of how the blackbirds are referenced, the different “ways of looking” indicate a central theme related to the plural nature of perception. This theme, combined with its disconnected structure, further begs the question of whether the poem has one speaker or many.

Take a Study Break