The Full Text of “Anecdote of the Jar”
1I placed a jar in Tennessee,
2And round it was, upon a hill.
3It made the slovenly wilderness
4Surround that hill.
5The wilderness rose up to it,
6And sprawled around, no longer wild.
7The jar was round upon the ground
8And tall and of a port in air.
9It took dominion everywhere.
10The jar was gray and bare.
11It did not give of bird or bush,
12Like nothing else in Tennessee.
The Full Text of “Anecdote of the Jar”
1I placed a jar in Tennessee,
2And round it was, upon a hill.
3It made the slovenly wilderness
4Surround that hill.
5The wilderness rose up to it,
6And sprawled around, no longer wild.
7The jar was round upon the ground
8And tall and of a port in air.
9It took dominion everywhere.
10The jar was gray and bare.
11It did not give of bird or bush,
12Like nothing else in Tennessee.
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“Anecdote of the Jar” Introduction
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"Anecdote of the Jar" was written by Wallace Stevens, an important figure in 20th-century American poetry. In the poem, an unnamed speaker places a jar on a hill in Tennessee. As the natural world continues to grow around the jar, the speaker declares that the object becomes a kind of king of the landscape, forcing the surrounding wilderness to rise to meet it. An ambiguous and enigmatic poem, "Anecdote of the Jar" has been subject to a wide range of interpretations in the decades since its publication. As with much of Stevens's work, it might be symbolic of any number of things—from the perils of modern industrialization to the nature of creativity and perspective. And, of course, the poem can also be taken at face value—as simply being about a jar on a hill. "Anecdote of the Jar" was published in Stevens's first book, Harmonium, in 1923.
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“Anecdote of the Jar” Summary
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The speaker put a round jar on top of a hill in Tennessee, where, the speaker says, the jar caused the messy wilderness to grow all around the hill.
That wilderness grew toward the jar, sprawling all over the hill—yet now that wilderness was tame and domesticated. The round jar on the ground on top of the hill was tall and empty.
The jar became king of everything. It was gray and empty. The jar wasn't part of nature like the birds and plants nearby, unlike everything else in the state.
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“Anecdote of the Jar” Themes
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Humanity vs. Nature
“Anecdote of the Jar” explores the relationship between humanity and the natural world, and in particular humanity’s desire to impose order and structure on its environment. By placing a human-made object (one literally designed to contain things, no less) in the middle of the sprawling “wilderness,” the poem contrasts two very different creations—that is, this rigid object and the "slovenly" natural world that grows all around it.
The jar clearly seems out of place, but what exactly its presence means is up for debate—and depends a lot on how readers interpret the symbolism of the jar itself. Maybe the poem is a commentary on the suffocating rigidity of modern life (which tames the wilderness—perhaps itself representative of creativity and spontaneity), or maybe it's a critique of the human desire to conquer the earth and a takedown of industrialization. In the end, the poem raises enigmatic questions about the relationship between humanity and nature, rather than making bold statements about that relationship itself.
The set-up of the poem is straightforward: the speaker places a jar in the middle of rural Tennessee. A jar is a simple object that reflects the way that people seek to categorize, contain, and control the world around them. Jars are solid, human-made containers than can be used to preserve food, for example. Jars also may evoke images of factories and mass production, perhaps suggesting that the jar here is meant to symbolize the stifling convenience and structure of modern life. Above all, the jar seems to represent civilization, and serves as a sort of emissary of the human world.
Nature, meanwhile, seems “slovenly”—messy and careless—in comparison. That the speaker deems it “wilderness” emphasizes the contrast between the neat, orderly jar and untamed world that surrounds it.
The speaker then says the jar is a kind of king that takes hold (“dominion”) of the world. The presence of human order, even in the humble figure of a jar, apparently imposes a sense of pattern and purpose on its surroundings, which notably rise toward the jar until the wild is “no longer wild” at all.
The jar, then, essentially infects nature, taming or domesticating its wilderness. This might reflect the way that human society literally dominates so much of its environment. Read differently, the "dominion" of the jar perhaps symbolizes the way that modern life stifles the kind of loose creativity represented by nature.
In either interpretation, the orderly human world butts up against the comparative freedom of nature. And at the same time, the fact that the jar is empty might suggest that humanity’s supposed orderly dominion over nature is hollow, or a kind of illusion.
To that end, though humankind can invent, design, and make its own objects, the poem suggests that nature is still the ultimate creator. Note how the jar remains “bare” (not even fulfilling its main purpose to contain things!) and indifferent to “bird or bush,” both of which are evidence of nature’s capacity for creation. Humanity’s inventions are useless without their creators (a jar can’t fill itself), whereas nature’s “bird and bush” flourish all on their own. This might reflect the way that modern life, with all its rigid rules and expectations, is itself hollow, in that it robs life of the kind of genuine creativity and spontaneity seen in nature.
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Perspective and Meaning
Not much really happens in “Anecdote of the Jar”: the speaker places a jar on a hill, and nature continues to grow around it. Yet the way the poem describes this event changes everything—nature doesn’t just “surround” the jar, it is “made” to do so by the jar itself.
This, of course, doesn’t make literal sense; a jar can’t make anyone do anything! The poem, then, seems to be as much about the way in which the jar is perceived by a human observer as it is about the jar itself. The poem can thus be read as a meditation on the human instinct for narrative and meaning—the desire to create an “anecdote,” to make sense of the world through stories and art.
Though it’s easy to miss, an important shift occurs early on in the poem. After the speaker puts the jar on the hill, the jar becomes the star of the show. But because the poem has already introduced the first-person, it has also subtly insisted that the poem does have a limited, human perspective. That is, the reader doesn’t necessarily have to take what happens at face value; they’re just seeing how the human speaker perceives the scene at hand.
With that in mind, it’s fair to question whether the jar really does anything at all. Looking at the facts, the jar sits inanimate on the hill and nature, as might be expected, keeps on doing its thing (i.e., it grows). Yet the poem presents the jar as a kind of king, establishing “dominion everywhere” over the natural environment. Perhaps this says more about the speaker’s desire to make the jar seem meaningful, as though it’s not enough—or is too nonsensical—for a jar to merely sit on top of a hill.
Here, then, readers should pause to consider the fact that the speaker actually performs two actions in the poem: placing the jar on the hill, and then telling an anecdote about the jar (the poem is that anecdote). Consider how different the poem would be if the first line was “A jar was placed in Tennessee,” thus removing the human perspective. The poem itself thus represents meaning-making in motion, the speaker constructing an almost mythical epic out of a pretty inconsequential event.
Along these lines, this poem is often related to another famous jar poem—Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” But while Keats’s poem aims for a profound contemplation of an artwork of the past, here the jar is only “gray and bare.” While Keats’s jar seems to almost take on a life of its own, the behavior of Stevens’s jar seems wholly dependent on the perspective of the human who is there to see it.
Perhaps this reflects the way people tend to want to make sense of the world, to reach a logical understanding of why things are the way they are even if no such understanding exists. The jar thus speaks to the human desire for narrative, for creating a story (“anecdote”) out of the external world (and, of course, creating a thematic narrative out of this enigmatic poem about an empty jar speaks to that same desire!). The poem, then, might ultimately be less about the jar and more about the human need to impose a framework on the “wilderness.”
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Anecdote of the Jar”
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Lines 1-2
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill."Anecdote of the Jar" is a typical Wallace Stevens poem in that what happens within the poem is easy enough to figure out, but how to interpret things is much more ambiguous. In fact, much of Stevens's poetry questions this need for interpretation in the first place—asking where it comes from, what role it plays in the human mind, and what purpose the insistent desire for meaning serves.
For the most part, the poem's tone and diction are strikingly simple. The first word is the first-person pronoun—"I"—but, after this, the speaker makes no more self-references. The speaker places a jar on a hill in Tennessee, and so ends the speaker's active role in the poem! The jar is placed on a hill, and, of course, the jar is round.
So far nothing seems out of the ordinary, but there's already a lot to unpack here:
- A jar is a human-made object, whereas a hill is of course a natural environment.
- In one small gesture, then, the speaker creates a kind of tension between something artificial and something natural: jar vs. hill, civilization vs. nature.
- Perhaps the jar is a kind of challenge to the natural world, beckoning Mother Nature to prove her power by reclaiming the jar from its human-made status.
- Or maybe the jar represents the speaker's desire to impose human will upon the natural environment. In truth, it's too early in the poem to say—and arguably such questions can never be fully answered!
Note that the poem itself is a human-made object too, and these opening lines use perfect iambic tetrameter (a meter with four iambs per line—four feet with an unstressed-stressed, da-DUM, beat pattern):
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.This is a very common meter, and gives the opening—for want of a better phrase—a very poem-like feel. Things already are very rigid and constructed.
The speaker's statement of the obvious—that the jar was round—and the somewhat awkward caesura in line 2 perhaps further signal that the poem is also about the human desire to make order and art out of the surrounding world.
Most people would just assume the jar was round, but it's as though the speaker needs to state this in order to do justice to the fact that this is artistic writing. The grammatical inversion of "round it was," rather than "it was round," is also almost self-consciously literary. Perhaps, then, it's fair to think of the speaker as performing two actions—the placement of the jar on the hill, and the action of telling the reader about it through the medium of poetry.
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Lines 3-4
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill. -
Lines 5-6
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild. -
Lines 7-8
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air. -
Lines 9-10
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare. -
Lines 11-12
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
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“Anecdote of the Jar” Symbols
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The Jar
The jar is clearly important to the poem, but critics have long debated what, if anything, the jar represents. Perhaps most broadly, it seems to represent humanity—or, more specifically, human civilization.
The jar asserts a kind of strength over the "Tennessee" wilderness, forcing it to be "no longer wild." On one level, then, that the jar might represent the way humanity tries to civilize and/or dominate the natural world—such as by cutting down forests to build cities, or using natural resources to create tools.
The jar may also evoke imagery related to factories, industrialization, and commodification. In this reading, the jar—a rigid, standardized object that tames the sprawling growth that surrounds it—may also represent the way that modern society zaps life of its spontaneity and freedom.
The fact that jars are used to contain things reflects this idea as well. This jar is empty, without any substance, meaning, or creative power of its own. While nature can grow and breed, the jar needs a human hand to fill it (and to make sense of its presence in the poem!). It's also deemed "a port in air" in line 8. A port is a transportation hub, here reflecting the idea that this jar is merely a vessel of sorts—something that people may fill, or may ascribe meaning to, but which, unlike nature, has no creative power in its own right.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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Nature
Nature is, like the jar, a literal presence in the poem. At the same time, nature seems to take on some symbolic resonance. In one interpretation, nature in the poem can be thought of as representing creativity and creative inspiration—two things that, the poem implies, the jar (and, by extension, humanity) lacks.
Where the jar is solid and motionless, nature in the poem is "slovenly wilderness." The word "slovenly" basically means messy, while wilderness is the opposite of civilization—something untamed, sprawling, loose. If nature represents creativity, then the jar's "dominion" represents humanity's attempt to capture that creativity (such as through the writing of this poem).
Yet the speaker implies that by capturing creativity, humanity inevitably tames it too; the wilderness is "no longer wild" once it's under the jar's dominion. Genuine creative freedom, then, is perhaps incompatible with the orderly, rigid confines of modern life (represented here by the jar).
This idea gets echoed in the final stanza of the poem, when the speaker points out that the jar can't create the way nature does—that it does "not give of bird or bush." The natural world can grow and breed in a way that human-made objects cannot. Nature, then, might also be a source of creative inspiration that humanity requires in order to fill its empty jars. The jar is merely a "port"—a kind of transportation hub that creativity may pass through.
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“Anecdote of the Jar” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration appears only two times in "Anecdote of the Jar," and in both cases it suggests nature's abundance. The first example occurs across lines 3 and 4, and is part of the broader sibilance in this section of the poem:
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.The /s/ sound here helps build a picture of the Tennessee wilderness as flourishing and overflowing, as full of natural life. This sibilance also suggests something slightly sinister in the repeated hiss of that /s/ sound.
The other example of alliteration comes in the penultimate line, which says that the jar:
[...] did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.The jar stands out in the Tennessee "wilderness" because it isn't part of nature—it isn't alive. The alliteration of "bird" and "bush" suggests nature's creative abundance, how the landscape that surrounds the jar is full of birds, insects, bushes, trees, and so on. The jar, by contrast, is an empty space devoid of life.
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Assonance
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Caesura
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Consonance
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End-Stopped Line
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Enjambment
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Personification
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Polysyndeton
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Repetition
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"Anecdote of the Jar" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Slovenly
- Wilderness
- Sprawled
- Of a port
- Dominion
- Give of
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Disordered, untidy, and/or careless.
- See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Anecdote of the Jar”
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Form
"Anecdote of the Jar" has 12 lines split up into three quatrains. This steady, straightforward form feels disarmingly simple considering the ambiguous events the poem describes. That's part of the point: things here are all about perspective, and there may be more contained within these short lines than meets the eye.
The poem's title offers a clue for how to interpret what happens here. This is specifically an anecdote, a short, often amusing story usually told in a casual, conversational tone. Anecdotes are often used to illustrate a point about something, though what that point is here is up for debate.
Referring to the poem as a casual anecdote also comically contrasts this poem with more highbrow poetic forms like the ode (famously used in John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," a poem to which "Anecdote of the Jar" is often compared). The poem's form, then, is as slippery as its content. On the one hand, it pushes readers to ascribe deeper meaning to what happens, while at the same time presenting itself as something simple and straightforward.
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Meter
For the most part, "Anecdote of the Jar" uses iambic tetrameter. This means there are four iambs per line, or four poetic feet with an unstressed-stressed, da-DUM, syllable pattern. For example, here are lines 1 and 2:
I placed | a jar | in Ten- | nessee,
And round | it was, | upon | a hill.These lines feature perfect iambic tetrameter, which gives the poem a very poem-like feel, to put it simply—it sounds like poetry, like something carefully crafted by the speaker. The poem, like the jar, is a human-made object of sorts. There's something gently comic about this aspect of the poem too. The speaker here seems caught between the inconsequential act of placing a jar on the hill and the need to say something profound—or poetic—about it.
There are three lines in which the poem deviates from iambic tetrameter. Two of these variations come in lines 3 and 4:
It made | the slov- | enly wil- | derness
Surround | that hill.It's also possible to scan "wilderness" as "wilderness"; either way, the poem clearly loses the rhythmic regularity that it established in lines 1 and 2. Here, the speaker describes the way that the wilderness surrounds the hill on which the jar sits, and the disruption in the poem's steady meter reflects the disorderly chaos (as the speaker sees it) of the Tennessee landscape. In other words, the poem loses temporary control of its meter to signal the unpredictability of nature. The shortness of line 4 (which uses iambic dimeter, since there are just two iambs in this line) serves a similar purpose, abruptly bringing the stanza to an end.
The other variation occurs in line 10, which describes the jar:
The jar | was gray | and bare.
This line is one foot short, meaning it's a line of iambic trimeter. This suggests the emptiness of the jar, contrasting its barren negative space with the flourishing natural life all around it.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Anecdote of the Jar" doesn't have a steady rhyme scheme, but it does have some rhymes throughout. In line 7, for example, there's an internal rhyme between "round" and "ground." The rhyme sticks out in the poem, much like the jar sticks out in the Tennessee wilderness.
Towards the end of the poem, there's also a string of three end rhymes in a row in lines 8, 9, and 10—"air," "everywhere," and "bare." This sudden rush of rhyme builds up the poem's momentum, perhaps suggesting excitement on the part of the speaker as the end of the "anecdote" approaches.
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“Anecdote of the Jar” Speaker
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The poem doesn't give much away about its speaker—no name, age, gender, job, etc. There is, however, a distinct speaker in the poem, indicated by that "I" in line 1:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
Though the reader doesn't learn anything about this "I," the fact that there is an "I" in the first place is important. This means that this "anecdote" is being told from a single person's perspective. Think how different the poem would feel if it began simply, "There was a jar in Tennessee." The presence of that "I" means that the reader is getting one person's impression of events—something subjective, rather than an objective take on what happened with the jar.
The title has also already announced that this poem as anecdote, a brief story usually told in conversation. The speaker, then, casts a long shadow over what happens in the poem, even though the reader learns nothing definite about this individual. All readers know is that the speaker thinks the presence of the jar totally changed the natural landscape of Tennessee. The poem is, in part, about the human desire to impose order and meaning onto the world, and the speaker is perhaps doing just that.
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“Anecdote of the Jar” Setting
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As its first and last lines make clear, the poem is set on a hill in rural Tennessee, a state in the southeastern U.S. The natural world here is unruly and flourishing, wild and unkempt as it grows all around "that hill." There's a definite contrast, then, between the empty, gray, and defined space of the jar and the flurry of growth and activity all around it.
The fact that the poem takes place in a specific state is interesting as well. The U.S. is the land of the "American Dream," a place traditionally defined by an ethos of hard work and innovation. The jar itself might evoke factories or industrialization, as well as the conveniences of modern life in the U.S.—things that, the poem subtly suggests, are at odds with the creativity and freedom of the natural world.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Anecdote of the Jar”
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Literary Context
Wallace Stevens first published "Anecdote of the Jar" in 1919. The poem was later included in the poet's Stevens's first collection, Harmonium, which remains one of the most influential works in American poetry since its publication in 1923. Stevens is considered part of the Modernist tradition alongside figures like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, though, in truth, his work is distinctly original.
Harmonium contains other poems with "Anecdote" in the title, namely "Earthy Anecdote," "Anecdote of Men by the Thousand," and "Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks," though this poem is by far the most well-known. Stevens uses "Anecdote" in its title as a kind of announcement of the poem's form. Generally speaking, an anecdote is a short story told in a conversational and casual way. They're often amusing and somewhat humorous, playing with the reader's expectation of poetry as something serious and high art. In fact, this kind of tension between the profound and the throwaway is a common thread in Stevens's poems, who famously wrote that "the poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully."
"Anecdote of the Jar" embodies this approach, puzzling critics ever since its publication. For some, the poem is a critique of humankind's lust for dominance over nature, while for others it represents the power of the imagination and the mind's capacity to perceive meaning and narrative in the world. Other poems in the same collection work with similar themes; check out "The Snow Man," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."
In its contemplation of an inanimate object, "Anecdote of the Jar" fits in with a long line of poetic tradition. However, the choice of object here—a humble jar—and the poem's subtle sense of humor create the impression that this is an ironic take on that poetic form: ekphrasis (the literary response to an artwork).
Helen Vendler, one of the 20th century's foremost literary critics, suggests that the poem only makes sense as a parodic response to a poem by 19th-century British romantic poet John Keats—"Ode on a Grecian Urn." While Keats's jar—or urn—is decorated and seems to momentarily come alive, Stevens's jar is barren and gray, though it nevertheless exerts a cold and strange power over the landscape (according to the speaker).
Historical Context
The poem was written in the early 20th century, and the changing nature of manufacturing and labor form part of its atmosphere. Innovations by entrepreneurs like Henry Ford were changing the way that products were designed, put together, and taken to market. The perfect storm of violence and technological innovation that was WWI had also cast doubt on old Victorian notions of humankind's onward march of progress over the centuries. Generally speaking, the Modernist movement in literature—of which Stevens is a key poet—is viewed as a response to a world undergoing wide-reaching and rapid change.
Wallace Stevens also travelled frequently for work as an insurance company executive, and it is thought that he may have composed this poem on a trip to Tennessee in 1918. In a letter home to his wife, Stevens describes how the "Tennessee River makes a great bend through woods and cliffs and hills and on the horizon run the blue ranges of the Appalachian Mountains," a line that echoes the poem's focus on the "wilderness" of the state. He also notes a number of the trees he encountered (Tennessee has more species of trees than any other in America).
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More “Anecdote of the Jar” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poet's Life and Work — A bountiful resource from the Poetry Foundation, including podcasts, essays, and more of Stevens's poems.
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Critical Perspectives on the Poem — A selection of analyses, demonstrating the wide range of interpretations available to this ambiguous poem.
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Harmonium in Full — Check out the 1923 poetry collection in which "Anecdote of the Jar" appears.
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"The Thrilling Mind of Wallace Stevens" — An interesting New Yorker article about Stevens's life and work.
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Harold Bloom on Stevens — Audio of a fascinating lecture on Stevens by Harold Bloom, one of the most influential literary critics of the 20th century.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Wallace Stevens
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