Stevens Theory

"Theory" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1917, so it is in the public domain.

The instances are instances of imagination at work, as in creation of a poem. They are not instances of a scientific theory, for they represent the particularizing quality of imagination, not the generalizing that takes place in scientific reasoning. They may allude to a theory about poetry, to the effect that that it should be local, engaging the environment one has roots in. (See the main Harmonium essay about localism.) But the instances are so loosely connected to any particular locale that they suggest the theory's refutation. The poet's imagination can go anywhere.

Buttel interprets the poem as one of Stevens's attempts to approach the rhythms of prose, as part of a strategic understatement that moves into a poem in an offhand, `anti-poetic' way. He sees that the instances must carry the strength of the theory, but he says nothing about how to understand theory in Stevens's specific sense, and nothing about what strength amounts to in this context.

Compare "Theory" to "Anecdote of Men by the Thousand".