This collection of readings of 97 poems written and published by Wallace Stevens includes many of his better known works, including the “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, which we have used as a title, as it aptly conjures the multi-faceted, abstract nature of his work and its way of seeing the world. Also included are other well-loved classics such as “Anecdote of the Jar”, “The Emperor of Ice Cream”, "The Snow Man”, "Peter Quince at the Clavier”, and “Sunday Morning”.  The poems were originally published in magazines, most notably in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, and in Broom,  Contact, The Dial, The Little Review, The Measure, The Modern School, The New Republic, Others, Rogue, Secession, and The Soil. Many of them appeared in Harmonium, Stevens’ first collection published in 1923.

Stevens is the quintessential Modernist poet, given to reflection and abstraction but resisting any kind of objective reality.  In his view, reality is more of a dynamic activity, the product of the imagination shaping the world as it perceives and seeks coherence and understanding, with piecemeal and fluctuating results. He admired painters Paul Cezanne for his ability to reduce the visual world to a few key objects and Paul Klee for his use of imagined symbols, and sought a similar kind of verbal result in poetry. Accordingly, the poems abound in specific objects and rich visual imagery, which commingle with associated abstractions to produce a poetry that is “the Supreme fiction” that draws us to engage with a reality that resonates with truth, if only for a fleeting moment.

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