Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Wallace Stevens is the author of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and he first published the poem in 1917 as a part of the literary anthology Others: An Anthology of New Verse. In 1923, he included the poem in his first collection of poetry, Harmonium, which features many of Stevens’s most well-known poems—poems that continue to appear in anthologies—like “The Snow Man“ and “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” Stevens was born in Pennsylvania and lived most of his life as an insurance executive in Connecticut. Despite his ostensibly stable life, his poetry links to Modernism and its emphasis on fragmentation and jarring images. Like other Modernists and a notable number of 20th-century Western poets, Stevens’s poetry can come across as obscure and difficult to interpret. What Stevens is trying to say isn’t always easy to grasp. Yet that’s the point—the modern world is an intricate place, and, in a Modernist perspective, poems should reflect its complexity. In “Thirteen Ways,” Stevens highlights the tangled nature of modernity with themes like How to See, The Fluidity of Reality, and