The Black Bird of Edgar Allan Poe and Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Blackbirds (Literature) (Critical Essay‪)‬

ABSTRACT Both Poe and Stevens perceived imagination as the ultimate faculty of the human mind. The paper attempts a detailed comparison of Poe's "The Raven" and Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" as an a example of two different approaches to the relation between imagination and perception. In "The Raven", the romantic poet seeks a total disjunction between the real and the imagined world whereas the modernist poem presents a close interrelation between those two realms. According to Poe, the ultimate meaning should be sought beyond the physical world, out of time and space, beyond the gravitational pull of the common as only the autonomous product of the poetic imagination can be fully integral and coherent. Stevens, in turn, shows that the tangible real, the sensuous world with the multiplicity of perspectives it offers is the powerful substance for his imagination and a necessary element of his poetic landscape. The modernist poet "seeks nothing beyond reality, and within it everything." He finds an anchorage in the real and uses it as an advantage while Poe desperately tries to transcend the material and find the absolute Beauty in the self- contained aesthetic realm of his creations.