"Anecdote of Men by the Thousands" is a poem from Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

's first book of poetry, Harmonium

Harmonium (poetry collection)

Harmonium is a book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens. His first book, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. He was in middle age at that time, forty-four years old. The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred...

 (1923). It was first published previous to 1923 and is therefore in the public domain, according to Librivox.http://librivox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4077

Anecdote of Men by the Thousands  The soul, he said, is composed  Of the external world. There are men of the East, he said, Who are the East. There are men of a province Who are that province. There are men of a valley Who are that valley. There are men whose words Are as natural sounds Of their places As the cackle of toucans In the place of toucans. The mandoline is the instrument Of a place. Are there mandolines of western mountains? Are there mandolines of northern moonlight? The dress of a woman of Lhassa, In its place, Is an invisible element of that place Made visible.

Stevens recognized that his poems were a visible expression of (an invisible element of) his North American place. This would remain true even if the poet were to succeed in overcoming locality, as Crispin attempts to do in "The Comedian as the Letter C

The Comedian as the Letter C

"The Comedian as the letter C" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's firstbook of poetry, Harmonium . It was one of the few poems firstpublished in that collection and the last written for it...

". The opening stanza is a dramatic statement about the soul's being composed of the external world, an idea approached philosophically by American philosophers like Charles Sanders Peirce. Compare Theory

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...

.

The following lines of the poem are anticipatory assertions, and then two leading questions, and finally a blossoming of the poem's idea in the image of a woman of Lhassa.