Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) 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 an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955. "Anecdote of the Jar" is a poem from Wallace Stevens' first book of poetry, Harmonium. First published in 1919, this much-anthologized poem succinctly accommodates a remarkable number of different and plausible interpretations. Robert Buttel suggested in 1967 that the speaker would arrange the wild landscape into the order of a still life, and though his success is qualified, art and imagination do at least impose an idea of order on the sprawling reality.