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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Wallace Stevens

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Anecdote of the Jar

Wallace Stevens

From “Pecksniffiana”

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.