Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

“Thirteen Ways” is an example of Modernism—a literary movement that started around the early 1900s and ended in the mid-20th century. Modernist authors and artists were suspicious of objective reality. Due to advances in technology and the experience of two world wars, the world became an increasingly disruptive, fragmented, and violent place. Instead of universal truth, there was the individual and their splintered experience. Stevens highlights the lack of cohesive reality by presenting 13 different ways of perceiving a blackbird. In other words, there isn’t one true or right way to perceive a blackbird. How a person sees a blackbird depends on where the blackbird is and where the person is—it’s elusive and complex, like 20th-century life.

Stevens’s poem also links to the early-20th century Imagist movement. As the name suggests, Imagists emphasized poetry that was succinct and produced clear pictures. They believed a poem’s primary purpose was to show the reader a vivid image. There’s much overlap between the Imagists and the Modernists, and Stevens’s poem highlights the similarities. He offers the reader a series of sharp portraits, yet the presence of a clear picture doesn’t make it easy to comprehend. Ezra Pound, a leader of the Imagist movement, created a famous two-line Imagist poem “In a Station of the Metro“ (1913). Like Stevens’s images of the blackbird, Pound’s image of the Paris subway jars and confounds.