Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens is one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century. He is generally considered part of the Modernist tradition, though his output is so singular that it doesn't really fit in with other Modernist figures like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.
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Videos
Click on the image above to access the video "Wallace Stevens."
The hero of Wallace Stevens’s poetry is the human imagination. Like Emily Dickinson’s, Stevens’s sedate and uneventful outer life concealed a lush and adventurous inner one. Such adventures were for Stevens not an escape from reality but a journey toward a new reality. Although Stevens was no philosopher–he was a bold and brilliant poet–he explored the workings of the human mind with a precision philosophers might envy. [Transcript available.]
SOURCE: Voices and Visions series (1988), Produced by the New York Center for Visual History. [Duration: 56:45 mins], video available from Annenberg Learner, URL: https://www.learner.org/series/voices-visions/wallace-stevens/