In the following essay, Lewis interprets Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" utilizing Imagist poetic theory.

SOURCE: "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Imagism," in South Dakota Review, Vol. 30, No. 4, Winter, 1992, pp. 66-86.

"Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this."[1] Despite, or perhaps on account of this critique, Wallace Stevens wrote a work that rivals any for its imagism. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (PM, 20-22) was written in the year Amy Lowell published her third (and final) installment of Some Imagist Poets. "Ways" is itself another, better imagist anthology—better, but also different. Like most of the poems in Lowell' s collection, each "Way" treats things of no ostensible importance. In the process, however, each is a study of a mode—a "Way"—of perceiving, which for Stevens, is "the Thing Itself," while the...