"Metaphors of a Magnifico" 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 in 1918, so it is in the public domain. The poem experiments with perspective.

Metaphors of a Magnifico  This is old song  That will not declare itself ...  Twenty men crossing a bridge,  Into a village.  Are  Twenty men crossing a bridge  Into a village.  That will not declare itself  Yet is certain as meaning ...  The boots of the men clump  On the boards of the bridge.  The first white wall of the village  Rises through fruit-trees.  Of what was it I was thinking?  So the meaning escapes. The first white wall of the village ... The first fruit-trees. ...

It explores the difference
between detached reportage in its various foci (on a group of twenty
men, on one man, one bridge, twenty bridges, one village, twenty
villages), on one hand, and immediate lived experience (the first
white wall of the village rises through the fruit trees) , on the
other hand. Stevens' preference for the latter, addressed in his
scornful treatment of William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

 in "Nuances of a
Theme by Williams

Nuances of a Theme by Williams

"Nuances of a Theme by Williams" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry,Harmonium.The italicized first lines make up a poem, "El Hombre", by Stevens' modernist contemporary William Carlos Williams. The poem was first published in Little Review 5...

", is what commentators have in mind when they
speak of his sensualism. Magnifico may be one of those men crossing
the bridge, shifting from viewing himself and the world from various
external perspectives to the first-person viewpoint ("Of what was it I
was thinking"?). What declares itself is subjective experience. The
meanings that enable objective description of the world do not declare
themselves.

Buttel cites the poem to support his claim that Stevens has the Cubists'

Cubism

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...

 ability
to see different perspectives of an object simultaneously: "One must assimilate the multiplicity here," he writes about the various bridge crossings, "just as the viewer of Duchamp's painting must assimilate the fragmentation and multiplicity of the nude descending the staircase."

See also The Snow Man

The Snow Man

"The Snow Man" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. "The Snow Man" was first published in 1921 in the journal Poetry, volume 19, October 1921 and is in the public domain.-Overview:...

 and Gubbinal

Gubbinal

"Gubbinal" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It is in the public domain according to Librivox.It can be read as one of his "poems of epistemology", as B. J. Leggett styles it in his Nietzschean reading of Stevens' perspectivism, a minimalistic statement of his...

for related experiments in perspective.