"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," with its realism and unadorned imagery, was written in the shadow of a long tradition of bird poems. If the poem's speaker believes the "thin men of Haddam" will be incapable of writing compelling poetry about idealized, mythical birds, it may be because the Romantic poets exhausted that field of poetry a hundred years earlier. Of the Romantics, an English poetic movement from roughly 1800-1840, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley both penned famous lyrical poems honoring birds: "Ode to a Nightingale," and "To a Skylark," respectively. For the Romantics, the opposite extremes of rapturous bliss and cataclysmic woe were the stuff of poetry, and their best work often brought beauty and death into intimate proximity during emotional flights of fancy. Though Keats and Shelley, along with Byron, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, are still revered, attempts to replicate their style were seen as overwrought and cliche by the 1910s. Thus, many Modernist masterpieces, like "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," directly deconstructed the Romantic legacy.
For Keats and Shelley, the nightingale and skylark sound remarkably like fantastical "golden birds." They are seen as too beautiful to be real, and as the writers project a world of poetic idealism onto the birds, they become heavenly spirits rather than animals:
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. (Shelley, "To a Skylark")
Through this "unpremeditated art," and the "full-throated ease" of Keats' nightingale song, birds came to represent the ideal poets of nature, capable of a emotional eloquence that human poets could only ever dream of achieving. The birds of these two poems are perfect beyond belief, "immortal" (Keats) and untouched by the pain, grief, and death that haunt human life.
Desperation becomes a dominant tone in both Romantic poems, as the poets are tempted to forsake their own human sanity in exchange for the bird's poetic wisdom. Keats variously ponders drinking his way into oblivion (stanza 2), and embracing "easeful Death" to escape the human world (stanza 6), and Shelley writes of the "harmonious madness" that would flow from his lips if he had "half the gladness" of the skylark. The more that Keats and Shelley projected an image of otherworldly perfection onto the birds, the more catharsis they were able to achieve by lamenting their own sorry state as human poets with limited perspectives, destined for short, conflicted lives. Meanwhile, the birds became more and more unreal, as their monumental symbolic meanings overshadowed the original animals.
For Stevens and the Modernists, the Romantic poet's state of mind, ricocheting between emotional extremes of rapture and despair, would have been appallingly unstable. Far better, Stevens would argue, to look plainly at an ordinary blackbird without dressing it up, writing simple images that let the blackbird's presence speak for itself. It is not a heavenly messenger whose lyricism we can never hope to achieve: it is a just a bird, and we can make of it what we want. On the one hand this is a lackluster perspective: the birds are no longer heavenly or special. On the other hand, it is a perspective that believes in the power of the human consciousness: rather than hopelessly longing to be slaves to nature's superior beauty, the Modernist poet believes that the human perspective creates the meanings we find in nature. According to Stevens, we can control our own perspective if we are conscious of how we see the world—and nowhere is a poem's speaker more in control of his own point of view than in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."
A few other poets demonstrate options of how to write about birds post-Romanticism: Edgar Allan Poe, in his famous 1845 poem "The Raven," galvanized a new Gothic symbolism for the black bird as an omen of death and loss—unearthly in a different way than Shelley's skylark—which was another legacy with which Stevens' blackbird had to contend.
"The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins, written in 1877 and published much later in 1918, still views the bird as a heavenly messenger but is able to find a stable peace of mind, not in the dry power of human perspective like Stevens, but in unifying faith in Hopkins' Catholic God.
Stevens' contemporary Robert Frost also treated birds in a uniquely post-Romantic way: the title creature of "The Oven Bird" is the summer songbird wondering "what to make of a diminished thing," which, in the poem, is the loss of spring, but also more broadly evokes the demise of established poetic norms that happened around the time of World War I. Instead of being a paragon of pristine nature, the bird mirrors the poet as he tries to make new meaning in a world in which the old forms of beauty now seem outdated and trite.
