The Fourteenth Way of Looking at a Blackbird

Abstract

IN a creative act that proved poems could be composed in a mode even before the appearance of phenomenological criticism, Wallace Stevens wrote his Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. As might be expected from a reading of the poem's title alone, the piece contains thirteen stanzas, each limited to a single aspect of the poetic persona's concern for blackbirds-from the purely perceptual to the more abstractly conceptual, from their purely surface appearance to their placement somewhere within that persona's worlding world. To the thing as it exists in itself there is no reference: only the aspects, thirteen in all, through which the bird makes its appearance to the poetic consciousness. The poem is thus epistemological, showing how, within human experience, something comes to be known for the particular significance it has for the perceiver. And only a reading of the entire poem, its expressing surface considered along with and in relation to its expressed depth, is capable of showing what that significance is. Poems, it appears, are like Stevens's blackbird: they can only make their appearance through a myriad of aspects relating an object we cannot know in itself and our own consciousness as we allow ourselves