The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, Literary Classics of the United States, 1997.

Note that the parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the cantos (1-13) of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is poem written by Wallace Stevens. It first published in 1917 and was included in the poet’s first book of published verse in 1923, titled, Harmonium. The poem consists of thirteen cantos which, as its title suggests, ruminate on a blackbird from differing vantages. This structure has been interpreted as an extended reflection on perspective and embodied experience. In this way, the poem embraces many modernist themes like positionality, imagism, and the opacity of human experience.

The first canto describes spotting the eye of a blackbird in a tree, a moving object amidst a vast stillness. The second canto then introduces the idea of multiplicity of perspective within the narrator, self-characterized as being “of three minds” as if three different birds in a single tree (2). This shift introduces the ambiguity of perception itself and prioritizes sensory experience in the poem over narrative or linearity. Each canto reframes the blackbird in a different pose, working it into tangential meditations in often surprising ways. The final canto returns to describe the solitary and stoic bird sitting in its cedar tree, as first visualized in the poem’s opening lines.