Author Question: What sense can you make of Part X? Make an enlightened guess. What will be an ideal ... (Read 116 times)

mspears3 · **on:** Jul 20, 2018

What sense can you make of Part X? Make an enlightened guess.

What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

In which sections of the poem does Stevens suggest that a unity existsbetween human being and blackbird, between blackbird and the entire natural world? Can we say that Stevens philosophizes? What role does imagery play in Stevenss statement of his ideas?

What will be an ideal response?

kmb352 · **Reply #1 on:** Jul 20, 2018

Answer to Question 1

This section eludes final paraphrase. Are the bawds of euphony supposed to be, perhaps, crass ex-poets who have sold out their Muses, who utter music to please the public instead of truth? But blackbirds flying in a green light are so strikingly beautiful that even those dull bawds would be moved to exclaim at the sight of them.

Answer to Question 2

Sections II, IV, VII, and VIII imply various aspects of unity between humans and blackbirds, while sections III, IX, and XII especially suggest the unity of the blackbird with nature in general. As for philosophizing, Stevens himselfwho apparently regarded Thirteen Ways as a suite or a sequence rather than a single poemdismissed the notion (perhaps somewhat disingenuously) in a 1928 letter to an editor who had anthologized some of his work: This group of poems is not meant to be a collection of epigrams or ideas, but of sensations. Critic Richard Allen Blessing takes a more nuanced view:

Although Stevens limits himself to thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, the poem suggests that life is a potentially infinite series of encounters between an external, phenomenal reality which is forever changing and an imagination which can never be satisfied. . . .
t seems to me that to see the blackbird as representing death or any other single possibility from all thirteen points of view is to misread the poem. As the title implies, the point of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird is that in thirteen different contexts the imagination is able to provide thirteen different values for a bird which would appear to the utilitarian or the scientist to have only one value, one way of being looked at. (Wallace Stevens Whole Harmonium Syracuse UP, 1970 2324, 26)
As for the use of imagery as a vehicle of theme, consider the following passage from the standard biography of Stevens (the core of such an approach is more succinctly and memorably stated in the famous slogan of Stevenss contemporary William Carlos Williams, No ideas but in things):
Thirteen Ways is abstract in its depiction and, because of that, pointed to many particular facts which had touched Stevens and from which he had drawn off the perceptions he voiced in the poem. Facts, in Stevenss sense, were closest to William Jamess understanding of them as makings of the deepest sources of human nature. As critics have noted, one of the strongest facts affecting Stevenss composition of this poem seems to have been Hiroshiges ways of looking at Mount Fujirenderings that contributed as well to Six Significant Landscapes, written months earlier. With this anchorage as reference, it was easy to see both these poems primarily as attempts to describe epistemological problems in pictorial form and to account for their abstraction by saying that it reflected the nature of thought itself. (Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens: The Early Years 18791923 New York: Morrow, 1986 477)