Tennessee, located halfway between the fruitful southern climes of Florida and the winter of the North, presents a perfect place for Wallace Stevens to explore his attitude toward the kind of creative identity that position is created in both cases. The South, characterized by its warmth and wild nature, clashes with the "grey and bare" (10) industrial North on that hill in Tennessee in "Anecdote of the Jar". Although the jar gains the upper hand, the poet does not necessarily grant favor to both sides of the conflict as Stevens was “of two minds…about this half of the South” (Stevens, 208). Here we see that Stevens finds himself in a place both geographically and poetically between the two extremes. He has not yet reached the goal of his poetic journey, but he seems closer to the beginning of his journey than the end. Old images of nature and Keats's Urn surface here in Tennessee and while he hasn't finished "stripping the leaves off the tree," Stevens has more than begun to strip it. “Anecdote of the Jar” reflects Stevens' ambivalence regarding man's ability to create order in a chaotic world and the role of the artist or poet in using old forms to create new order. The vase, a man-made object, represents the power of human creation through art to control and confine natural creation. Stevens' vase is more than just a container, it is capable of both defining and confining the natural environment around it, as it “has taken dominion everywhere” (9). The order imposed by the jar is capable of taming the wild nature that “has risen” (5), but is rendered “no longer wild” (6). The roundness of the vase is its distinctive feature and is in fact the first attribute attributed to it (2). The sound of “round” dominates the poem just as the jar dominates nature… at the center of the paper… point of vivid contrast. The vase helps create a place of order in what is seemingly a disorganized system, but in reality even the wilderness has its own kind of order. One of the purposes of art has been to reflect, imitate or oppose that order. As a poet, Stevens faces the challenge of using the poetic form, the can, in a way that is fresh and interesting. To do this, he must expose the urn left to him by Keats. When the urn is stripped of images of spring melodies and ecstatic lovers, we are left with the shape of the vase. The vase is lifeless and bare, but not necessarily sterile. It is the medium in which Stevens can develop his own poetic voice and identity. At this point, halfway through his journey between South and North, Stevens has completed the task of cleaning up all the old images and is now able to begin filling the jar with new ones..