Earthy Anecdote (poem)
"Earthy Anecdote" is the first poem in Wallace Stevens' first book of poetry Harmonium (1923). The text of "Earthy Anecdote" can be read here and is followed by a commentary.
This initial poem of Stevens' canon has caused consternation among critics. One of the most astute of these, Martha Strom, writes,"Stevens locates the bucks in Oklahoma, which firmly situates the poem in the 'local' school of writing, but he imbues the localist donnée--a particular landscape, some bucks, and a cat in Oklahoma--with the motion of his imagination, and the flat 'local' scene acquires texture and life." When Stevens was a student at Harvard he was interested in the local-color-movement in American writing, but that interest grew into a life-long philosophical study of imagination and reality and how their intersection could lead to poetry. And those terms are ones that apply more usefully to "Earthy Anecdote" than "local color." An anecdote is a tale—fact or fiction—told to demonstrate a point. "Earthy' means "not heavenly," especially for Stevens. "Earthy Anecdote," then, is a down-to-earth tale of Native-American warriors and a "firecat." We know the "bucks" existed and once rode their horses over Oklahoma. That world was real. We know that the "firecat" is imaginary, and as a creature of the imagination it has blazing eyes and leaps faster than galloping horses. The "bucks" belong to a large contingent of the real human race that since prehistorical days have feared imagined creatures.
What is it about the firecat that inspires such fear in the warriors' hearts? One plausible perspective is to see the firecat as a descendant of the poet William Blake's famous "Tyger":
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
The poet Blake knew the answer to that question was the genius of human imagination, which can spin anecdotes, invent firecats, reveal scriptures, and, most importantly for Blake and for Stevens, create poems. "Earthy Anecdote" is a perfect opening for Stevens' first book of poems and for his entire body of work. From this first poem till his last, Stevens deeply pondered and wrote about the meanings of "reality," "imagination," and their intersection as a well-spring of poetry.
Notes
Strom, Martha. "Wallace Stevens' Revisions of Crispin's Journal: A Reaction Against the 'Local'". Reprinted in Axelrod and Deese.