Earthy Anecdote

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"Earthy Anecdote" [1] is the first poem in Wallace Stevens' first book of poetry Harmonium (1923). The passage of a group of "bucks" is impeded by a "firecat". There is little consensus about its meaning, even after 100 years of critical attention, and Stevens himself refused to provide one. On the surface, his poem describes a herd of deer that stampede ("clatter") left and right in order to avoid a lurking wildcat, who pounces back and forth in front of them, and afterwards (presumably after catching and eating one, or maybe not) closes its eyes and sleeps [2] .

Local Color

According to Martha Strom [3] , "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 school of American writing, but that interest grew into a lifelong philosophical study of imagination and reality and how their intersection could lead to poetry.

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References

  1. ↑ Poets.org, https://poets.org/poem/earthy-anecdote#:~:text=Every%20time%20the%20bucks%20went,The%20bucks%20clattered
  2. ↑ BACIGALUPO, MASSIMO. “Wallace Stevens and the Firecat.” The Wallace Stevens Journal, vol. 21, no. 1, 1997, pp. 94–98. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44884463. Accessed 26 Feb. 2024.
  3. ↑ Strom, Martha. “Wallace Stevens' Revisions of Crispin's Journal: A Reaction Against the 'Local.'” American Literature 54 (1982): 258–76.


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