You are what you analogize

A stanza from Wallace Stevens poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird was display on the home page of Poet.org this morning.

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

The poem reminds me of William Carlos Williams' Red Wheel Barrow and Archibald MacLeish's Ars Poetica, in that it seems to be a meta-poem, a poem about writing poems, about the nature of art.

The entry for Stevens on the site placed him between the English Romantics and the French Symbolists -- between, and I'm interpolating here, "inflection" and "innuendo." Which got me onto Symbolism (so attracted to abstraction, the French). The Poetry Portal says the Symbolists "rejected the pastoral tradition, and took their themes and images from city life, emphasizing its bleak, hallucinatory and/or illicit aspects."

This is, of course, only one characteristic of the Symbolist movement. But it got me thinking about the imagery and analogies (not to mention forms and techniques) writers use change over time.

Homer derived most of his imagery from nature. The exception to Homers nature-based imagery may be the scene in the Iliad in which Hephaestus makes armor for Achilles; his animated forges and girls made of metal are VERY unnatural, the stuff of science fiction. These rare technology-based images aside, Homer was grounded in nature. How many Homeric similes in the Iliad depict a lion ravaging a sheep while quaking shepherds watch? His audience were farmers themselves and intimately acquainted with nature, so those analogies were accessible to them.

It makes sense then that people living in cities would write for other people living in cities by using urban imagery. Suburbanite that I am, I'm wondering how to work Starbucks and rush-hour traffic into my writing.