Ars Poetica, And Wallace Stevens Anecdote Of The Jar

Many would describe art as the implementation of the human creative skill and the vivid imagination, but three particular poems give art a deeper meaning and give rise to a struggle that is both manmade and natural. Both Archibald Macleish 's, “Ars Poetica,” and Wallace Stevens’, “Anecdote of the Jar,” share a common theme, in which art outlasts the living. Each of the poems uses a particular object to reflect this common subject. In Macleish 's poem, a poem itself is used and in Stevens’ poem a jar is used. The common characteristic among these objects is that they are all man made creations that withstand time, art that is timeless. Aside from the theme, they share similar settings, speakers, and even conflicts. These poems thoroughly probe …show more content…
Literature critic, Roy Harvey Pearce described the poem as the “wrestling with the problem of imagination and reality,” which he considered to be Stevens’ theory of poetry("Explanation of: 'Anecdote of the Jar ' by Wallace Stevens." ,n.p.). The speaker in the poem relates how the jar affects its surroundings and vice versa and appears to have an internal conflict of whether the jar is something ordinary or an extraordinary piece of art made by man. Pearce considered the 9th line “It took dominion everywhere” was the most dominant line in the poem because it established the jars position as king over its surroundings (Pearce, n.p.). This line reflected how the speaker knew that by placing this jar in the middle of nowhere on a tennessee hill he was changing the landscape ,but at the same time the speaker was conscious that there is a reality out there that he cannot grasp with his weak imagination.The jar is given life when it is said to make “the slovenly wilderness/surround that hill” and even the wilderness itself is described as “sprawled around, no longer wild” (Stevens, n.p.). The jar becomes a symbol of civilization, all that is man made and almost reveals a struggle between nature and art. Throughout the poem there is a conflict, whether nature overpowers art or vice versa. The speaker seems to take the side of the jar, art and anything that is made, however throughout the poem the power of nature is also appreciated and shown as growing and multiplying endlessly, something that an inanimate object like a jar cannot do. Pearce argued that the last four lines of the poem reflect Steven’s view on the limits of the imagination (Pearce, n.p.). In these lines the jar that is “gray and bare” and “It did not give of bird or bush” shows that the jar like the imagination is unlike the nature like the reality