I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.
(Wallace Stevens is one of those divisive folks that is hard to feature without some prefacing. There are going to be others in this vein in the future.)
In 2002 or 2003, I was told in no uncertain terms by a friend attending a class on poetics that if I wanted to challenge myself in deciphering meaning and meter, I should read Wallace Stevens. He was parroting his professor at the time, who was an absolute Stevens stan, and I took it as gospel. I stole a copy of Harmonium from a local library (libraries still carried books and I was still a shithead) and I dug in. My major takeaways, which I scrawled across various margins of the book, were that the guy was racist and his work was difficult to understand. The book went onto my bookshelf and would only get a glance when I got a burst of false confidence that I’d suddenly figured out exactly how poetry worked. Spoiler: I didn’t.
A couple of years later I was at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and a guy recited a piece he’d named “Fuck Wallace Stevens.” I don’t remember the details of the poem, but it was essentially highlighting that he was a horrible human that produced wonderful poetry. As a big fan of Pound (the work rather than the man), this served as an impetus to dig back into that yellow covered book gathering dust on my shelf.
I was reminded of all this recently when the poem above was featured during a recent CWC talk on meter. It’s probably better that I was having significant tech troubles in the way of an malfunctioning mic and camera because I would have surely launched into a whole thing about both the poem, but also Stevens’ work in general. Instead, I saved all that energy for you fine people reading this.
Wallace Stevens was racist and sexist. He was a white man born in 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania. The odds were not in his favor. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, an expert on Stevens’ work, wrote a great book called The Violence Within, The Violence Without in which she argues that later Stevens poetry shows evidence of a idealogical shift in his personality. She argued the point excellently, although I don’t think I buy it completely. I say all of this to say that art is strange. It is a slice of perspective, and while at times the eyes that we are offered to peer through are flawed (or flat-out awful), the view is worth the look. And if it offers any solace, by all accounts Hemingway once knocked Wallace the fuck out at a gathering. So that’s fun.
This poem is the final “Anecdote” poem in a series of 5 spread throughout the collection. There is no overt signs that they are related outside of the inclusion of the title word, but enough time with the set and some links appear. The speaker of the anecdotes seems intent on finding some sense in the balance of nature and man. This final anecdote is a measured conclusion on the topic.
The first two lines set up our conceit - the speaker has placed a jar on a hill. Think clay, not glass. This jar is a perversion of the hill that it sits on. It is earthen but has been modified by man to be more than earth, and it is round like the hill it sits on, but in an entirely different way than what we mean when we describe the hill. There is a uncanniness tucked into the simple image of the jar on the hill, an afront to the ground itself.
The third line points out the superiority of the jar through the description of the surrounding nature as slovenly. It is the exact opposite of the intentionality presented in the jar. It’s worth noting that Stevens very intentionally breaks from some iambic tetrameter in the first two lines with the insertion on an extra syllable. Slovenly means messy, and Wallace reinforces this image by making the line itself slovenly. Fucking brilliant.
The final line of this stanza, “surround that hill” feels short because it is short. It’s only half of what our brain wants to see after the first 3 lines. By syllabically isolating the hill in the line, Stevens is symbolically presenting the hill as a stage. The jar is not just thrown into the wilds, it is at the very center of them.
We’re back in tetrameter for the central stanza. Order has settled in after that brief departure, and similarly in the text order has begun to find its way into the wilderness. Simply by existing and presenting a frame of reference, the jar has given order to the world around it. Rather than nature existing in a chaotic sprawl, it now appears to be pointing towards the jar on the hill. It has been given purpose as a side effect of the presence of the jar. Man gives nature a reason to be, even if it didn’t need one in the first place.
The final line of the second stanza is interesting. The jar is empty. It occupies space and demands attention, but it is a hollow thing. This contradicts the feeling of importance that we have as a result of an entire poem being written about this jar on the hill, but it does a good job of acknowledging that tinge of meaninglessness that sits beneath all of society. All of our achievements are destined for dust. Our greatest buildings will collapse and our stories eventually forgotten. They are empty things occupying space at the moment. They are the jar.
The final stanza tries to reason out these two contradicting feelings. The jar suddenly performs an action - it takes dominion of everything around it. But this action isn’t intentional, it is another side-effect of its existence. A jar couldn’t really do anything that would allow it to control anything at all, so it must be another play of perspective. The world feels like it belongs to the jar, so surely it must. This stanza also teases us with some common meter in the first two lines. I spoke about common meter before - four metric feet followed by three. It sounds sing-songy. Our brains are hard wired to hear the music in common meter and as a result it leaves us wanting a similar ending. Stevens does not satisfy the expectation because of the contradiction surrounding this jar. It doesn’t quite fit, so the meter doesn’t either.
The next two lines further differentiate the jar from nature - it is featureless and grey. The exact opposite of the vibrant world around it. It doesn’t give rise to the wonders of the natural world, to flora or fauna. It’s just a fucking jar at the end of the day. It is nothing like anything else in the world (or in this case, Tennessee) but it just had an entire poem dedicated to it. And in that way, it mattered. It was special because we made it special - the speaker by presenting it and the reader by giving time to it. It was a product of perspective.
Terrance Hayes in “Watch Your Language” has a lot to say about Stevens. Like everything Hayes writes, it is well worth reading.
We see this in the same light... a white man marking his territory, declaring dominion.