The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Stevens, Wallace. “Anecdote of the Jar,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14575/anecdote-of-the-jar.

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Born in 1870, Wallace Stevens was an American modernist poem. The grouping of his poetry is generally split into three periods. The first is inaugurated by the publication of his first book of poetry, Harmonium, which includes "Anecdote of the Jar." His second period of writing is the 11 years before the publication of Transport to Summer. During this second period, Stevens also published Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar, and Parts of a World. Stevens’s third and last period of writing began with the publication of The Auroras of Autumn and ends with his Collected Poems a year before his death in 1955. In the 50s, Stevens was generally regarded as one of the top American contemporary poets.

In critical scholarship, Stevens has frequently been associated with the Symbolist branch of modernist poetry. The Symbolist movement, which began in France and Belgium, was interested in the vast representative potential of art. For example, from a Symbolist perspective, Stevens’s jar in his poem does not necessarily have to be a literal jar. Rather, the jar can be more archetypal, and its meaning is more metaphorical to gesture towards more abstract truths. Nonetheless, a purely Symbolic analysis of Stevens’s poetry proved to be limiting – critics and scholars focused only on mapping symbols onto the objects and concepts for which they supposedly stood. Letting go of this Symbolic reading of Stevens’s work has led to much more varied interpretations of his poetry, including “Anecdote of the Jar.”

Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” was originally published in Stevens’s first book of poetry, Harmonium. The ambiguity of what exactly the titular jar represents perhaps accounts for the vastly different readings of the poem. For example, from a feminist lens, the jar represents masculine dominance over a traditional femininity associated with disorder. Another reading suggests that “Anecdote of the Jar” is about humans’ artistic invention when it comes creating meaning in a random, previously untouched wilderness. A third interpretation even posits Stevens’ poem as a response to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”