Industry and the urbanization of the American landscape had taken a stronghold by the early twentieth century. By the 1950s and 1960s, technology formed the American way of life. The union of man’s technological inventions with an American wilderness is metaphorically represented in Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Anecdote of the Jar.” The poem contains a modern pastoral theme to create an existence of “harmony” surrounding man’s attempt to order wilderness against nature’s cyclical and incessant pattern.
“Anecdote of the Jar” is by no means a narrowly defined pastoral poem; however it is one aspect of the theme. Stevens asserted himself that giving an explanation for a poem removes all curiosity to explore the meaning any further, and paraphrasing obliterates the meaning (Lensing 270). The versatility of interpretation is limited to the subject, but there is no definitive explanation as Stevens expressed when asked to define his own poetry.[1] For this reason, the pastoral theme is only one view of the different “shadows” of this poem.
Pastoral themes are evident throughout literary history.[2] The ancient pastoral ideal applies to modern society’s search for the utopian paradise without negating civilization.[3] Tennessee wilderness, where the narrator places the jar, is an uncorrupted but slovenly nature. Civilization, or art created by man, is composed within the jar, man’s manipulation of the natural elements. The jar of civilization when placed in unadulterated nature “made the slovenly The
wilderness surround that hill.” It made the wilderness “no longer wild” and therefore inhabitable for humankind’s pastoral vision.
Many critics have compared “Anecdote of the Jar” as a reaction to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” [4] poems, from Keats’s “Cold Pastoral!” to Stevens’s “gray and bare” jar that “did not give of bird or bush.” The coldness and bareness of civilization is the archetype that connects these two poems and unifies the artifice of man in the presence of sublime nature.[5] According to Northrop There is a pastoral similarity between the art represented in both
Frye, an unifying symbol can connect two poems and unify the “literary experience” in an archetype.[6]
The pastoral image appears to exist for no other reason but to describe pleasing scenery for pure aesthetics,[7] pastoralism is in opposition to modern technology, and this magnetic opposition is discussed at length by Leo Marx in his The Machine in the Garden published in 1964, some 40 years after Stevens wrote “Anecdote of the Jar.” Marx notes that the discovery of America by Western except when humankind exerts its “dominion.” The aesthetics of
society rejuvenated the ancient pastoral ideal. The American view of life became “the dream of a retreat to an oasis of harmony and joy” (Marx 3). The society may have had a pastoral renaissance in the discovery of the New World, but industrialization became the ‘machine’ is the ‘jar.’ Marx illustrates the contradictory union of civilization and man just as Stevens does in “Anecdote of the Jar.[8]
Nathaniel Hawthorn describes “Sleepy Hollow” in his journal in 1844, “a shallow space scooped out among the woods, which surround it on all sides, it being pretty near circular, or oval, and two or three hundred yards…But hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive—” (qtd. in Marx 12-13). This passage examines the technology of man in a metaphorical circular union with nature because after the train goes by and the whistle noise disappears in the distance
everything returns back to nature. Just as nature “rose up to” the jar, “and sprawled around, no longer wild” so the “Sleepy Hollow” is “scooped out” and “surround[s] it on all sides,” “near circular” in shape. Marx introduces the Hawthorne’s “little event” as the shaping of a metaphor that occurs again and again in American literature (32). The roundness in “Sleepy Hollow” echoes Stevens’s “round,” “surround,” “around,” and “ground” in “Anecdote of the Jar” that
The circular, round, and repeating pattern of the “jar” is sometimes argued as man’s imagination against an external reality, one of a never-ending interplay of “chaos to order”[9]”a universe of inconstancy.”[10] wilderness is a pastoral metaphor, yet is human’s mark simply the train whistle passing through nature as we long for an eternal existence among nature? The “jar” as humankind’s aesthetic existence within the constant and
[1]”Obviously, it is not possible to tell one what one’s poems mean, or were intended to mean. On the other hand, it is not the simplest thing in the thing in the world to explain a poem. I thought of it this way this morning: a poem is like a man walking on the bank of a river, whose shadow is reflected in the water. If you explain a poem, you are quite likely to do it either in terms of the man or in terms of the shadow, but you have to explain it in terms of the whole” (qtd. in Lensing 271).
[2]Pastorals about shepherds were first written by Theocritus (c. 316-c.260 BC). “It [pastoral] is of great antiquity and interpenetrates many works in Classical and modern European literature.” (Cuddon 686).
[3] The dominating idea and theme of most pastoral is the search for the simple life away from the court and town, away from corruption, war, strife, the love of gain, away from ‘getting and spending.’ In a way it reveals a yearning for a lost innocence, for a pre-Fall paradisal life in which man existed in harmony with nature” (Cuddon 689).
[4]Helen Vendler discusses the poverty of the American poet represented in Stevens’s Anecdote of the Jar” compared to the rich history of Western culture in Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (306).
[5]Bromwich states “Coldness like this, a possible attribute of the sublime and also of death” (254) Bevis suggests the “tall and of a port in air/It took dominion everywhere” as the wealthy British Western civilization that “cut across the landscape” to create order out of chaos (269-270).
[6]Frye’s myth criticism looks at poetry as a “technique of civilization” with an “archetype used as a communicable symbol…. And when pastoral images are deliberately employed…we can see that the convention of the pastoral makes us assimilate these images to other parts of literary experience” (99).
[7]Ettin defines the pastoral image’s existence “to be without ulterior intention, existing for the sheer satisfaction of the scene described” and examines Stevens’s “The Poems of Our Climate” as a pastoral poem with “images of simplicity, freshness, and innocence that function the way pastoral images function in more traditional works, opposing clutter and corruption (33).
[8]”Only rarely did Stevens participate in the widespread identification of American modernism with the aesthetic of technology” (Steinman 134). “Stevens wrote much more about the weather, birds, and flowers…” subjects and themes more appropriate to pastoral scenes…”Stevens did not share the excitement that many of his contemporaries voiced about the look of urban modernity” (Steinman 135).
[9]Carroll argues the poem as a conflict between imagination and reality, and “The jar in Tennessee represents a purely formal principle of order, and this order cannot satisfy the deepest needs of Stevens’s imagination” (36-37).
[10]Gray argues the form of the poem leaves an open ended and continuous struggle between the imagination of man and nature by “joining the end to the beginning” (327).
WORKS CITED
Bevis, William. Mind of Winter: Wallance Stevens, Meditation, and Literature. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1988.
Bromwich, David. Keats.” Critical Essays on John Keats. ed. de Almeida, Hermoine. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1990. 222-260.
Carroll, Joseph. Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987.
Cuddon, J.A. ed. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 3rd Ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
Ettin, Andrew. Literature and the Pastoral. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1984.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.
Gray, Richard. Poetry and the Subject of the Poem: Wallace Stevens.” Modern AmericanPoetry ed. R.W. Butterfield. London: Vision Press, 1984. 41-57. Reprint TwentiethCentury Literary Criticism. ed. Laurie DiMauro. vol 45 of 57. Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1992. 324-329.
Keats, John. 1908 Keats: Poetical Works. ed. H.W. Garrod. Oxford: New York, 1992.
Lensing, George. Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1986.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 1964.
Steinman, Lisa. Made In America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1987.
Stevens, Wallace. 1967 The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Peoms and Plays. ed.
