Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Wallace Stevens · 1917 CE · Poem · Modern / American · Modernist

Among twenty snowy mountains the only moving thing is the eye of a blackbird, and thirteen numbered sections then set that bird against a man and a woman, a glass coach, a shadow crossing back and forth, and the thin men of Haddam asked why they imagine golden birds. Each section is an act of attention rather than a step in an argument. Stevens insisted they were sensations and not philosophy.

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