Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Wallace Stevens
- First Published: 1917
- Type of Work: Poetic sequence
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric sequence
- Subjects: Perception, Human race, Existentialism, Birds, Mountains, Decision making, Universe, Vision
The Poem
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is a sequence of thirteen Imagist poems written in variable syllabic verse. Line length varies from two to ten syllables, but the norm is four to eight syllables per line, thus approximating in English the line lengths of Japanese forms such as the haiku, the senryu, and the tanka, all of which utilize five- and seven-syllable lines. In effect, Wallace Stevens’s series is a sequence of Japanese-style Zen poems. The unifying factor in the series is the image of the blackbird, which appears in each of the numbered sections...
[The entire page is 1573 words long]
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