Anecdote of the Jar
by Barry Wright
Essay: Anecdote of the Jar
Pages: 10
Rating: 3 stars
Download Links:
• Anecdote of the Jar.pdf
• Anecdote of the Jar.doc
Tennessee, lying midway between the fruitful Southern climes of Florida and the wintery North, represents a
perfect location for Wallace Stevens to explore his attitudes toward the sort of creative identity he makes for
himself in either location. The South, characterized by its warmth and wildness clashes with the “gray and bare”
(10) industrial North on that hill in Tennessee in “Anecdote of the Jar”. Though the jar takes dominion, the poet
does not necessarily place favor on either side of the conflict since Stevens was “of two minds… about this midway
South” (Stevens, 208). Here we see that Stevens is in a place both geographically and poetically between the two
extremes. He has not yet reached his destination on his poetic journey, but seems closer to the beginning of his
trip than the end. Old images of nature and Keats’ Urn crop up here in Tennessee and though he has not yet
finished “taking the leaves off the tree”, Stevens he has more than begun to strip it bare. “Anecdote of the Jar”
reflects Stevens’ ambivalence about man’s ability to create order in a chaotic world and the role of the artist or
poet in using old forms to create a new order.
The jar, a man made object, represents the power of human creation through art to control and confine natural
creation. Stevens jar is more than a simple container, it is able to both define and confine the natural setting that it
surrounds, since it “took dominion everywhere” (9). The order imposed by the jar is able to tame the wilderness
which “rose up to it” (5), but is rendered “no longer wild” (6). The jar’s roundness is its defining characteristic and is
indeed the first attribute ascribed to it (2). The sound of “round” dominates the poem just as the jar dominates
nature...