A central concern in the Modernist literary movement is the way that language fails to describe human reality. Modernist writers explore this theme by changing the way they represent life in their work; their attempts vary from Imagism to including actual image depictions of objects into their prose. Related to the concern about language’s insufficiency in general is the concern that humans are unable to use language to describe an objective reality. Modernist writers explore how an observer’s subjectivity seeps into their observations, altering the reality that they observe. William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens explore this theme in their poems “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” and “Anecdote of the Jar” respectively. These works both center their observations on an individual’s perspective, demonstrating how subjectivity determines what one perceives as important and meaningful. In conversation, these works hold a tension between a created reality and the objective truth that speaks to Modernist concerns about humanity’s inability to capture reality.

 

The authors introduce an individual’s perspective at the start of their poems, framing all of their claims around someone’s subjectivity. Stevens begins writing, “I placed a jar in Tennessee” (1). The use of the first-person speaker in the first line establishes all of the poem’s events and observations as filtered through a specific person’s understanding. It cannot be understood to be an objective account because the speaker imposes themself as soon as the poem starts. This perspective’s imposition immediately has an effect when the speaker writes that they placed the jar in “Tennessee” as part of this framing. The idea of Tennessee, and for that matter all state lines, is a man-made construct written over a natural world that makes no such distinction. The “wilderness” described through the rest of the poem is given societal bounds at the outset of the poem because of the speaker’s understanding of their surroundings. Likewise, Williams’s first line is simply “According to Brueghel” (1). The speaker themself makes no claims; instead, they set the entire message of the poem against someone else’s credibility. The poem’s claims are immediately filtered through Brueghel’s perspective, but the speaker does not necessarily assert its truth. Williams writes “according to” without necessarily defending Brueghel’s ideas. With this framing, the poem becomes a report of Brueghel’s account on events from his perspective. The speaker, though not explicitly introduced, recounts Brueghel’s claim much like they recount Icarus’s fall, which prompts the reader to question the speaker’s reliability as well. Williams’s argument on subjectivity is liable to both Brueghel’s and the speaker’s subjectivity, and the language Stevens’s speaker uses to describe their surroundings are built on societal rather than intrinsic meaning. These authors both start their poems with a recognition of subjectivity that frames the rest of the poem with the perception of the subject.

 

The poet’s formal choices also emphasize the prevalence of subjectivity by centering the reading experience to reinforce their themes. The odd line breaks and the lack of punctuation in “Landscape” drive the reader to make decisions that determine their basic, denotative understanding of the poem. This understanding changes as the reader moves through the poem; for example, when reading the second stanza, “a farmer was ploughing / his field / the whole pageantry,” the reader might at first understand the third line to be describing the farmer’s field as elaborate and colorful (4-6). Their destruction of this “pageantry” when they “plough” it could represent a disregard for the beauty of nature in favor of their own concerns, namely their crops. Proceeding to the next stanza, though, “of the year was / awake tingling / near,” the reader might conclude that it was in fact the “pageantry / of the year,” referencing the vibrance of spring (7-9). The potential of life in spring and Icarus’s fall contrast because their different life cycles give them different concerns; while Icarus loses something, the natural world gains. Both of these readings hold, even through the lens of this poem as a comment on subjectivity. As the reader moves through the poem, the context they are aware of changes, and the poem comes to mean something different with shifting readings of its line breaks and lack of punctuation. “Anecdote of the Jar” resists the reader’s inclination towards neat understanding as well by refusing to conform to consistent formal patterns. While there are internal rhymes, Stevens only deploys end rhymes to describe the jar. He writes that the jar was “of a port in air. / It took dominion everywhere. / The jar was gray and bare” (8-10). This series of perfect rhymes at hard stops in the poem establishes a momentum towards more perfect rhymes. These rhymes establish the jar as a solitary item with quasi-political power. Associating it with a “port” invokes the idea of control over commerce and trade. Stevens suggests the jar has this kind of power “in air.” To be surrounded by air implies not being surrounded by other things. So, even decontextualized from societal structures, this jar still has power. It takes dominion “everywhere,” reinforcing its sense of omnipotence, and its being “gray and bare” makes it sound blank, as if nothing has had the power to influence it. In the next line, Stevens breaks this pattern, saying the jar did not “give of bird or bush” (11). To “give of” something means to care for it, and so while the speaker is saying that the jar does not care for any of the natural elements around it, the poem shows that invoking nature still changes the way that the jar is perceived. While earlier in the poem, the rhyme scheme was more rigid, once nature is brought into the picture, it cannot be maintained; nature cannot conform neatly to invented human patterns like rhyme. Both authors manipulate the reader’s expectations and experience of reading to comment on how context affects the object of consideration.

 

Even the titles of these poems have phrasing that frames the importance of certain elements in their poem, reinforcing the influence of context on perception. Stevens’s title determines that this is the anecdote of the “Jar,” despite the fact that there are three prominent actors in the poem: the speaker, the jar, and the wilderness itself. Before the first line, the poem already distinguishes the jar as the most influential element of the poem, which predisposes the reader to understand the wilderness’s response to it as less powerful. The wilderness is present in the jar’s anecdote, not the other way around; it is set as submissive before the poem starts, providing the reader with a specific context through which to read the wilderness that is reinforced by other elements of the poem. Similarly, Williams titles his poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” after Brueghel’s painting of the same name. Relevant to both pieces, they do not describe the scene as “of” Icarus’s fall, but rather as only “with” it. His fall is not a focal point of either piece despite its mythic origins; it is just another feature in this portrayal of the world. In the poem, the effort to deemphasize is even more evident. The painting cannot control the order in which the viewer absorbs the scene. Williams, however, places Icarus in the last line of the poem, ensuring that the reader does not “notice” his fall until after they have digested the concerns and imagery of the rest of the landscape. The title of this piece establishes from the beginning that Icarus’s fall is only included in the piece, not its focus. Yet, like the jar, the fall of Icarus is the only element of the poem mentioned in the title, framing the reader’s experience with the poem around the thought of Icarus. Without the fall of Icarus, the poem is simply a description of a landscape that the reader has no special motivation to consider. By distinguishing a myth that the reader, an outsider to this scene, would be interested in, the title gives the poem meaning to an audience not invested in the landscape itself. Much like the farmer finds Icarus’s fall “unsignificant,” the reader does not enter the poem invested in the farmer (18). Even as Williams suggests Icarus is not the center of this poem’s message, he appeals to the reader’s experiences to create something they might find worth paying attention to.

 

Both pieces’ messages reflect a Modernist anxiety regarding whether humans can represent reality objectively through focusing on an individual’s perspective that is altered by their subjectivity. These poets drive to make this subjectivity more apparent in their works, but they still maintain elements of their poems that are not evidently subjective until looked at closely. These concerns are in line with the occupations of the Modernist movement; these poets resist traditional understandings of reality and representation, bringing a new way to view an element as fundamental as the speaker of the poem. Other works may not declare their intent to discuss subjectivity, but the thorough exploration of how one’s experience inflects their observations suggests that they merit a similar consideration. Even if those authors do not intend to explore themes of subjectivity, these poets challenge readers to push against so-called objective narrators and see how the speaker’s positionality changes the way they understand the world around them.