I placed a jar in Tennessee
-- Speaker (Line 1)

Importance: These lines introduce “Anecdote of the Jar,” and establish the first-person speaker (“I”) and the most specific setting of the poem as designated by a proper noun (“Tennessee”). This first line, in introducing the first-person perspective, also sets up the bait-and-switch quality of the poem, in which direct markers of the first-person narrator of the poem disappear, which suggests the fading agency of the first-person speaker as the jar takes on greater control and power. These lines also mention the primary subject and symbol of the poem, the “jar,” a representation of human intervention that can be interpreted in multiple ways.

It made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill.
-- Speaker (Lines 3-4)

Importance: These lines are important because they further characterize the setting of Stevens’ poem: a “wilderness.” They also emphasize its perceived inability to be contained and its quality of being untouched by any kind of ordering...