"A Way to Look at Things", a poem by Arthur G. Dove published in Alfred Stieglitz's catalog for his exhibition, "Seven Americans", 1925. From the Phillips Collection Library, Gift of the Robert and Dana Quittner Family Trust.

In 1925, Alfred Stieglitz organized a show called Seven Americans to commemorate the 20th anniversary of his gallery, “291”. To support the works selected for the exhibition, he published four writings in the brief catalog, one of which is the poem shown above by artist Arthur Dove. Ann Lee Morgan, in her definitive book Arthur Dove: Life and Work, cites Stieglitz’s response to the poem, which addresses abstraction in art, as “a classic.” Morgan says that Dove occasionally took up poetry but that the poem printed in Seven Americans is the “most successfully constructed.”