Harmonium is a book of poetry by American poet Wallace Stevens. His first book at the age of forty-four, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1,500 copies. This collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines ("Life Is Motion") to several hundred ("The Comedian as the Letter C") (see the footnotesFrom the table of contents for Harmonium in Frank Kermode and Joan Richards, editors, ix–xi: Earthy Anecdote Invective Against Swans In the Carolinas The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage The Plot Against the Giant Infanta Marina Domination of Black The Snow Man The Ordinary Women The Load of Sugar-Cane Le Monocle de Mon Oncle Nuances of a Theme by Williams Metaphors of a Magnifico Ploughing on Sunday Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores Fabliau of Florida The Doctor of Geneva Another Weeping Woman Homunculus et La Belle Etoile The Comedian as the Letter C From the Misery of Don Joost O Florida, Venereal Soil Last Look at the Lilacs The Worms at Heaven's Gate The Jack-Rabbit Anecdote of Men by the Thousand The Silver Plough Boy The Apostrophe to Vincentine Floral Decorations for Bananas Anecdote of Canna Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb Of the Surface of Things Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks A High-Toned Old Christian Woman The Place of the Solitaires The Weeping Burgher The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician Banal Sojourn Depression Before Spring The Emperor of Ice-Cream The Cuban Doctor Tea at the Palaz of Hoon Exposition of the Contents of a Cab Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock Sunday Morning The Virgin Carrying a Lantern Stars at Tallapoosa Explanation Six Significant Landscapes Bantams in Pine-Woods Anecdote of the Jar Palace of the Babies Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs. Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow Cortège for Rosenbloom Tattoo The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws Life is Motion Architecture The Wind Shifts Colloquy with a Polish Aunt Gubbinal Two Figures in Dense Violet Night Theory To the One of Fictive Music Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion Peter Quince at the Clavier Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird Nomad Exquisite Tea To the Roaring WindPoems Added to Harmonium (1931) The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad The Death of a Soldier Negation The Surprises of the Superhuman Sea Surface Full of Clouds The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade New England Verses Lunar Paraphrase Anatomy of Monotony The Public Square Sonatina to Hans Christian In the Clear Season of Grapes Two at Norfolk Indian River for the table of contents). Harmonium was reissued in 1931 with three poems omitted and fourteen new poems added.Heyen, William. p. 147. The poems from the 1923 that were omitted from the 1931 edition are "The Silver Plough-Boy," "Exposition of the Contents of a Cab" and "Architecture". Those introduced in the 1931 edition are "The Man whose Pharynx was bad," "The Death of a Soldier," "Negation," "Sea Surface full of Clouds," "The Revolutionists Shop for Orangeade," "New England Verses," "Lunar Paraphrase," "Anatomy of Monotony," "The Public Square," "Sonatina to Hans Christian," "In the clear Season of Grapes," "Two at Norfolk" and "Indian River".
Most of Harmoniums poems were published between 1914 and 1923 in various magazines.Bevis, H.: "...sixty-seven of the seventy-four poems of the 1923 Harmonium had first been published in small magazines between 1914 and 1923." The first edition of Harmonium has this in its front matter: "The poems in this book, with the exception of The Comedian as the Letter C and a few others, have been published before in Others, Secession, Rogue, The Soil, The Modern School, Broom, Contact, The New Republic, The Measure, The Little Review, The Dial, and particularly in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, of Chicago, edited by Harriet Monroe." (Edelstein, p. 3) The poems are now in the public domain in America and similar jurisdictions.See Buttel for details about the publication dates of individual poems. See also the LibriVox site for the complete public domain poems of Wallace Stevens.
Initial reception in 1923
The book's first edition sold only a hundred copies before being remaindered,Robert Rehder adds: "During the 1924 Christmas season, two young poets, Richard Blackmur and Conrad Aiken, found that the first edition had been remaindered in the basement of Filene's, the Boston department store, at 11¢ a copy. They recognized the book's merit and bought all the copies to send as Christmas cards to their friends. The poet took a more ironic view of the book's sales. Around July 1924, he wrote to Harriet Monroe: 'My royalties for the first half of 1924 amounted to $6.70. I shall have to charter a boat and take my friends around the world.' (L 243)" (See Stevens, H. p. 243 for the letter.) suggesting that the poet and critic Mark Van Doren had it right when he wrote in The Nation in 1923 that Stevens' wit "is tentative, perverse, and superfine; and it will never be popular."Van Doren, p 400 Yet by 1960 the cottage industry of Stevens studies was becoming a "multinational conglomerate",Axelrod and Reese, p. 11 more than fulfilling Van Doren's prophecy that some day a monograph would be written that would pay tribute to Stevens' "delicately enunciated melody, his economy, his clipped cleanliness of line, his gentle excellence."Van Doren, p. 401 A library search in the twenty-first century at a typical university could be expected to bring up about 200 books under the topic "Wallace Stevens". The Wallace Stevens Journal has been published by the Wallace Stevens Society since 1979 and its editor, John N. Serio, has collected some of the journal's essays in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens. An audiobook of his complete public domain poems was completed by Librivox in 2007.
Critical assessments Poet and editor Harriet Monroe, who founded Poetry magazine in 1912, wrote in 1924, [T]here was never a more flavorously original poetic personality than the author of this book. If one seeks sheer beauty of sound, phrase, rhythm, packed with prismatically colored ideas by a mind at once wise and whimsical, one should open one's eyes and ears, sharpen one's wits, widen one's sympathies to include rare and exquisite aspects of life, and then run for this volume of iridescent poems.Monroe, 28 The poet Marianne Moore, Stevens' lifelong ally and friend, wrote shortly after the book's publication of Stevens' "achieved remoteness" of imagination, likening the poems to a painting that Tu Muh commented upon: Powerful is the painting... and high is it hung on the spotless wall in the lofty hall of your mansion."Moore, p. 84 "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" illustrates this quality.This poem did not appear until 1924. (It was included in the 1931 edition of Harmonium.) Because of frequent copyright extensions, notably the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and its like, it will not emerge from copyright restriction into the public domain until 2025. However, it can be found on the Internet. Although Joan Richardson's reading makes the case that the poem's "true subject" is an extended holiday that Stevens and his wife, Elsie, took in the fall of 1923, and specifically that the true subject is the poet's sexuality,Richardson 1982, p. 61. Richardson concludes her reading by acknowledging this distinction:In closing, I offer the following observations taken from "The Irrational Element in Poetry:" "One is always writing about two things at the same time in poetry and it is this that produces the tension characteristic of poetry. One is the true subject and the other is the poetry of the subject. The difficulty of sticking to the true subject, when it is the poetry of the subject that is paramount in one's mind, need only be mentioned to be understood." rather it is the powerful "poetry of the subject" that displays Stevens' genius and draws readers to the poem, as Tu Muh was drawn to the painting.
Moore casts Stevens as an explorer of the exotic who takes refuge in a "riot of gorgeousness". She adds that although "Mr. Stevens is never inadvertently crude, one is conscious...of a deliberate bearishness—a shadow of acrimonious, unprovoked contumely."Axelrod and Deese, p. 4 Stevens seems to admit as much in "The Weeping Burgher". "The Death of a Soldier" may have been one of the poems she had in mind, because of its almost brutal naturalism.
Edmund Wilson, writing in The New Republic in 1924, spoke without pretence for most readers of Stevens: "Even when you do not know what he is saying, you know that he is saying it well". This 'Wilson effect' is no doubt linked to Stevens' Adagia aphorism, "Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully".Kermode and Richardson, p. 910. "Colloquy with a Polish Aunt" is a good candidate for a Wilson award.Another good candidate is "New England Verses" which comprises sixteen stanzas, including these: III Soupe Aux Perles Health-o, when ginger and fromage bewitch the vile antithesis of poor and rich.
IV Soupe Sans Perles I crosses in '38 in the Western Head. It depends which way you crossed, the tea-bell said.
Matthew Josephson ranked Stevens among the best of contemporary poets, writing in 1923 that Stevens exhibits both a poetry of sensuousness and a metaphysical poetry. He favors the latter, as in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and "Anecdote of the Jar", predicting that they will be "spell-binding for hundreds of years". By contrast Charles Altieri has recently expressed a preference for the poetry of sensuousness. Stevens matters as a poet, according to Altieri, because of his commitment to the primacy of the senses. "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock", which peppers the reader with visual images, would serve as a simple example, "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" as more complex.
The Imagist poet and critic John Gould Fletcher wrote in 1923 that because of his honesty Stevens stands "head and shoulders" above the internationally famous aesthetes like Eliot, the Sitwells, and Valéry. He defended Stevens' "obscurity" as deriving from "a wealth of meaning and allusion". He discerned a poet "definitely out of tune with life and with his surroundings, and...seeking an escape into a sphere of finer harmony between instinct and intelligence". "The Wind Shifts" is one poem that supports Fletcher's reading. He warned that Stevens faced "a clear choice of evils: he must either expand his range to take in more of human experience, or give up writing altogether. Harmonium is a sublimation which does not permit a sequel."Axelrod and Deese, p.4 Stevens seems to have grasped both horns of the dilemma, writing little for several years after Harmonium and then returning with Ideas of Order and subsequent collections that emphasize what Fletcher would classify as metaphysical poetry. Buttel prefers to view the later work as "a kind of exfoliation" of his earlier style, the later poems "adumbrated" in Harmonium.Buttel, p. 250 Stevens' first idea for the title of The Collected Poems was The Whole of Harmonium.Critchley, p. 32)