Harmonium

by Wallace Stevens

Faber are pleased to announce the relaunch of the poetry list - starting in Spring 2001 and continuing, with publication dates each month, for the rest of the year. This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and the new titles within a single embracing cover solution. A major reissue program is scheduled, to include classic individual collections from each decade, some of which have long been unavailable: Wallace Stevens's Harmonium and Ezra Pound's Personae from the 1920s; W.H. Auden's Poems (1930); Robert Lowell's Life Studies from the 1950s; John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings from the 1960s; Ted Hughes's Gaudete and Seamus Heaney's Field Work from the 1970s; Michael Hofmann's Acrimony and Douglas Dunn's Elegies from the 1980s. Timed to celebrate publication of Seamus Heaney's new collection, Electric Light, the relaunch is intended to re-emphasize the predominance of Faber Poetry, and to celebrate a series which has played a shaping role in the history of modern poetry since its inception in the 1920s.

Genres: Poetry, American, Classics, Philosophy, 20th Century, The United States Of America, Fiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1923

About the author

Wallace Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine) was written at the age of thirty-five, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned fifty. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who called Stevens the "best and most representative" American poet of the time, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius.

Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903. On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel; after a long courtship, he married her in 1909. In 1913, the young couple rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie.
A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems.

After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he was hired on January 13, 1908 as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company. By 1914 he had become the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wallace Stevens’s verse—as exhibited in his first major work Harmonium (1923), published when he was forty-four—either jumps from one concrete sense impression to another, or else leaps beyond them all toward some particularized meditation filled with vivid imagery, lush sonority, and dry wit. One thing Stevens avoids, however, is “the malady of the quotidian”—what we would call “everyday life”—and thus he deprives his readers of anything approaching an autobiography.

Still, the life of Wallace Stevens shows through his verse. And as usual the life—like most other peoples’—is about love and money.

Stevens loved writing poetry, loved reading Whitman and Baudelaire; he loved Harvard’s literary atmosphere too, but had to quit school when Father told him there was no more money. Father said Wallace could find a lot of money in law, but instead he found a little money in writing: writing for the newspapers of the city of New York. He never loved the newspapers, but he loved the museums, loved looking at the Renoirs and Monets, the Picassos and the Duchamps. And he loved bohemian Greenwich Village, with its contempt for money, and loved hanging out with its poets: Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings. He also loved the French Symbolists, Mallarme and Apollonaire, and so he decided to quit newspapers and write his poetry in the original artist's bohemia of Paris. But Father said there was no money for him to go to Paris, so Wallace gave up his bohemian dream and began to study the law.

Stevens became a New York lawyer, good at making money, when, traveling on a train, he met Elsie Kachel, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. He fell in love, but knew Father would not approve (Elsie was what father called “common,” for her people had never had money), but he loved her, and knew he must have her, and worked hard to make money in order to make her his wife. (When they married, Father stopped speaking to Wallace. Father died two years later. He never spoke to Wallace again.)

Wallace and Elsie got an apartment in New York where Wallace worked for the Fidelity and Deposit Company (keeping that insurance money right where it belonged), and Elsie sometimes worked as a model. She was so beautiful she was chosen—so the story goes—by the sculptor Adolph Weinman to be the graven image on America’s money: not only the Mercury Dime, but the Walking Liberty Half Dollar too. Wallace still loved New York, but Elsie hated it with a passion, so Wallace got a job in Connecticut that paid even more money (Hartford Accident and Indemnity, keeping the insurance money right where it belonged) and now Elsie had the life she always thought that she wanted. Then came baby Holly, and Wallace and Elsie drew apart. Forever after, they slept in separate rooms.

Wallace kept the day job keeping the money where it belonged. But his lady, the one on the money, grew melancholy, grew away from Wallace, grew away from his love. So Wallace spent some of his money on vacations, stealing what beauty his imagination could find from winter sunsets off the coast of Key West.

Is my story a little too simple? Sure it is. There are other things one needs to know to understand Steven’s poetry—his lack of faith, his passion for order, and his attempt to reconcile the two—but, at least for my purposes, this story of love and money tells me much of what I want to know.

Harmonium (1923) doesn’t contain all of Steven’s best work (he wrote even better as he got older), but it contains most of the famous pieces we think of when we think of Stevens: the lyrics “Domination of Black,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Disillusionment at 10 O’clock,” “Bantam in the Pine Woods,” and “Anecdote of the Jar,” plus the exquisite meditation “Sunday Morning” (my favorite Stevens’ poem), and the sustained longer poems “Le Monocle du Mon Oncle” (an amused reminiscence of vanished love) and the “The Comedian as the Letter ‘C’,” a playful poem of poetic theory, in six parts.

I refuse to reprint these justly famous poems once again, but instead offer four lesser known but memorable examples of how Stevens—piecemeal, in fragments—fashioned a self through loneliness, through the power of the imagination, in spite of a surfeit of money, in spite of a lack of love:

TEA AT THE PALAZ AT HOON

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea;

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.


THEORY

I am what is around me.

Women understand this.
One is not duchess
A hundred yards from a carriage.

These, then are portraits:
A black vestibule;
A high bed sheltered by curtains.

These are merely instances.


NOMAD EXQUISITE

As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth
The big-finned palm
And green vines angering for life,

As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth hymn and hymn
From the beholder,
Beholding all those green sides
and gold sides of green sides,

And blessed mornings,
Meet for the eye of the young alligator,
And lightning colors
So, in me, come flinging
Forms, flams, and flakes of flames.


TEA

When the elephant’s-ear in the park
Shrivelled in frost,
And the leaves on the paths
Ran like rats,
Your lamp-light fell
On shining pillows,
Of sea-shades and sky-shades,
Like umbrellas in Java.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.

That was the line of the day for yesterday. It stung but the venom was euphonic. Evidence supports the idea that this collection might become my favorite. Ever.

There’s a trepidation in approaching Stevens. I was wary. A certain stalking was required. More Tarkovsky than anything perverse. The reader needs to step lightly, be prepared to crouch and above all speak low. I’m hopeful that such communion will suffice for my imminent walk. It is a day for such. I then reread The Comedian As The Letter C and was again floored.

A sunken voice, both of remembering
And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.

There’s something of Sebald in that. Perhaps Keats and Browne.

[Ulysse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Humongous Homunculus
A Pastis-fuelled pastiche

Abattoir for these indigo obese
Trombones of giant breathing, blow thou thy
Brassy and immemorial do-re-mis:

Mirages for our blinding ancestries.
Apple trees bending in a tramontane
Of feeling, leafy ambrosial lilt,

Kind sepulchres for living thoughts entomb
These bonfires, flags which thy enormous lust
Licks into shape, O mon chat! Thy yellow

Auguries, mouthing fiercely through thy furs;
Companion art thou to thirst’s monastère.
Pink words slink in and out the chinks of me.

What boudoirs tucked in the folds of what moons
Willingly could hold robin’s egg blue winds
Back from morning Rosalind’s thighs a-trembling?

Full fierce holiness thy weekly store see
Of systemic fraises tagada disgorged
From the depths of thy dying contralto:

Heaps of becoming like to chocolate buns.
Foul-mouthéd hickory hackney-coach sun,
Chew thy straw like an unhappy fiddler.

Wallace, Muse of Muss, build us palaces
Of sound, and probe the depths of meaningless-
Ness—unless meaning be that we must breathe.

[Farren · Rating 5 out of 5]

HOLY SHIT GUYS HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THIS WALLACE STEVENS???

From an email to a friend the morning I finished the book:

" I love that his syntax is just a little skewed so that you're knocked off balance initially, but once you get to the end of what you're reading it's a little like you've been listening to the dialect of a particular mind. I LOVE that he completely upends these sort of grand Romantic ideals of poetry (LOVE! DEATH! THE MEANING OF LIFE! THE ABSOLUTE GOODNESS OF NATURE! REVOLUTION! THE MOTHERFUCKING MOON!) and makes them comic, but then also you kind of wonder a little bit at the end if he isn't also sort of buying into them too, like a little in love with the moon too. I love the way he is constantly trying to make The West the landscape of his poems (that dude loves Florida, obvs has never been there) but it comes out as this sort of tragicomic tableaux full of christian schoolmarms and bawdy pioneer girls and spanish conquistadors drinking orangeade and shit. And he's got UNBELIEVABLE comic timing. The first line of one of the profoundest poems in the book goes, "Hi! The creator too is blind" and then he just breaks the line and I'm sort of imagining him bullrushing up to me and going HI! I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY! "

[Taka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impressive--

How do you write rococo poetry? How can you use abstractions and big, syllable-sucking words and make them sensual? Look no further than Stevens—he taught me how that can be done with panache.

To be honest, I was expecting more along the lines of the hyper-allusive-and-hence-elusive modernist poetry of, say, T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound in their most fuck-the-readers moments, but I was fortunately proven wrong. Wallace Stevens writes pulsing poetry with rich abstractions, concrete imagery, and philosophical depth—a combination I have rarely encountered elsewhere.

What I most appreciate about Stevens is—to use his own word—his poetry's "gaudiness," which to me is interweaving concrete details with sexy abstractions and big, ugly Latinate words. One gorgeous e.g.:

The plum survives its poems. It may hang
In the sunshine placidly, colored by ground
Obliquities of those who pass beneath,
Harlequined and mazily dewed and mauved
In bloom. Yet it survives in its own form,
Beyond these changes, good, fat, guzzly fruit.
(from "The Comedian as the Letter C")

He uses those big words like flourishes, as in rococo furniture, and somehow makes them look/feel/sound sensual, which is no easy feat to say the least.

Another thing I loved about Stevens is his contemplative streak, which satisfied that part of me that loves complexity by showing how you can go beyond the sparse, albeit pretty, imagery-rich poetry pioneered by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (and still practiced today). And so in his famous "Sunday Morning," for example, he pronounces ā la Keats, "Death is the mother of beauty" while criticizing, à la Nietzsche, religion in favor of earthly existence and manages to stay grounded in imagery and sensual phrases ALL IN BLANK VERSE (unrhymed iambic pentameter). There were so many lines I underlined and put double check marks next to that I decided to just go ahead and memorize the whole damn thing (and I did). Take Stanza V, which is fairly representative of what I'm talking about:

She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews leaves
Of sure obliteration in our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willows shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. And maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

Granted, not all his poems are accessible and I don't claim to have understood all of them, but they still offer enough rococo/sensual experience at the lexicographic, auditory, rhythmic, and imagistic levels that I really don't mind if the meaning escapes me, really. I'm actually having more trouble with Emily Dickinson's mysterious poems. Perhaps her poetry is more elusive, or maybe Stevens's poetry really resonated with me. Either way, I'll be reading more of Stevens (and in fact I am, in tandem with Dickinson).

A must read for any poetry lovers.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

i came across the first edition of this book with the multi-patterned boards in a library. sitting on the shelf next to criticisms. holding it and looking at the cover, it is a pastel rainbow. and turning it in your hand, to the spine with the paper label that reads harmonium makes you stop for an instant. on the word harmonium for sure. but more than that. in a stack in the library with metal shelves. the weight of the thing struck me. it was so so light. if it werent for the patterned boards and the paper label i would have thought i was holding air. the breaths of students. the breaths of lovers lost to north carolina. it was the weight orginally that stopped me. standing amidst metal shelving and poor light. the lightness. and opening it there. to the table of contents. reading the titles with my mother and father in mind one thousand miles away and in the middle of winter while outside the library yellow daffodils were in bloom. i turned to the snowman and read. and read. and read again. there is nothing left to say. it comes to you like this. in a library with metal shelves, your aging parents in mind. and a day later you are walking and stopping. and writing. and it pales to the least sentence in harmonium. but you write it out anyways. on a piece of newspaper. and later type it into an email to your brother in new york with the
subject: the distance narrowed.

It was the wind that wet the eyes of the observer and filled them to brimming.
Caught there at the precipice before spilling, as though a tourist photograph
of that great cataract which separates two forgotten cities with the same name.

It was the wind, with its fragrance of lilac and rose, with its sound of the
snapping of snow-white sheets on a clothesline, carrying with it bent sunlight
on once golden hair, that wet the eyes of the observer.

[Descending Angel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stevens first book of poems, published in 1923. It contains 85 poems, including a lot of his most famous. My only complaint is that there are so many poems, some of them could of been edited and it would of been a lot tighter and 5 stats , because there is a lot of good stuff in here. Highlights ~ "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage" "Domination of Black" "the snow man" "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" "Another Weeping Woman" "Homunculus et La Belle Etoile" "The Comedian as the Letter C" "From the Misery of Don Joost" "Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb" "Of the Surface of Things" "Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks" "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" "Sunday Morning" "Stars at Tallapoosa" "Nomad Exquisite" and "Anatomy of Monotony".

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

...três míseras estrelas...mas a culpa é minha...Wallace Stevens é demasiado agreste e indecifrável para mim.

Mas gosto muito deste:

"O VENTO MUDA

É assim que muda o vento:
Como os pensamentos de um velho humano,
Que pensa ainda ardentemente,
Desesperadamente.
O vento muda assim:
Como uma humana sem ilusões,
Que sente ainda coisas irracionais dentro de si.
O vento muda assim:
Como humanos chegando orgulhosamente,
Como humanos chegando irritadamente.
É assim que muda o vento:
Como um humano, pesado, pesado,
Que quer lá saber."

[Cymru Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wallace Stevens, a man whose imagination was the crux of his existence. Imagination is his gateway to the spiritual world (I hesitate to say God, cuz it aint a religious thing) and the force that ostracizes him from everyday society. How could real life compare to the imagined realm? How could one's own self ever stack up next to the imagined perfection of an angel? The main source of creative friction for Stevens is the discrepancy, in himself and the world, between reality and imagination.

Imagination can be dangerous. If you fall in love with your own imagination, good luck trying to make the "real world" in its image. Even when things work out just as you've described them in your head, it will only enervate you, make you feel sick and angry ("Floral Decorations for Bananas"). You think your imagination is special, somehow more beautiful than the real thing, capable of giving real human beings a significance larger than their own estimations or comprehension? Prepare to meet the force that will destroy you (And hail, cry hail, cry hail -"Hymn From a Watermelon Pavilion"). It isn't fair to judge people according to your own, inherently vague and shifting, vision of Beauty. Whether Stevens the person is willing to make this compromise is hard to tell. He doesn't seem like a guy I'd wanna get a beer with. He is however, not shy to point out his own impotence vis-a-vis the awesome angel of inspiration ("Bird With the Coppery Keen Claws").

This collection isn't entirely a teeth-grinding grudge match between Stevens the human and the God within. There are moments of utter clarity ("Of the Surface of Things" "The Place of the Solitaires" "The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician') where he submits to the power of the universe, something that wholly eclipses his own imagination, his "single candle," a substance infinitely beyond his own imagined perfection. Beware, however, because this force is omnipotent and thus heavily linked with death if not Death personified ("The Wind Shifts").

My personal favorites are the love poems, most memorably portrayed in "The Apostrophe to Vincentine" and "Two Figures in Dense Violet Night." The lush romanticism in these poems is seething with dark beauty, like a warm bath of summer night sky. The "woman" he's in a trancelike lust for is no human, she's not even a mere nymph, She is the Moon, she is the Night, she is Florida made Real. The Moon is associated with Artemis, chaste goddess of female death, the huntress that every lonely heart seeks to emulate. Artemis is a fitting figure of which to be smitten, for Stevens knows that the goddess shall not reciprocate except for these brief waves of feeling that leave you completely out of sorts, bereft of all context to the corporeal world, and totally in love.

On the whole the evocative imagery Stevens dispenses with is amazing. It took me multiple readings, and reading the poems out loud was essential. I think I like W.S. so much because his cadence just seems natural to me in my head. Lines like "curriculum for the marvelous sophomore" have a martial quality that I am instantly drawn to. Some might see nothing special in that line. It doesn't even matter what it means, there is power in the spells he weaves, and he has the most well-developed Sisterworld of any author I've read.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

WS's debut collection and in many ways a hit from the beginning. I'm aware of a few who say that Harmonium hasn't aged well - or at least that it's a lot more difficult to see it as revolutionary these days as compared to 1923. Probably that's true to certain extents though I think it's helpful to have read something like Williams' Spring and All for context. But Stevens is brilliant and this collection, early as it is, draws that out. He sounds such a poet of jazz to me too, modal jazz. I played some Coltrane with it & would recommend. He has a mind embedded in the classical etymology which he flashes at times ("Vocalissimus") but elsewhere he's working at something resembling the slow introduction of Japanese poetry to American lit in the early 20th - as in the classic Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Has any poet since thought so explicitly on the concept of anecdotal Form?
He's My Guy when he's at the sea. His monisms bleed into each other

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harmonium is Wallace Stevens' first book of poems, published when he was 44 years old and an insurance executive in Hartford.

I have read probably all of Stevens' poems through the years. I decided to take another look at Harmonium as a complete unit of his first poems. There are some of his famous ones here, such as The Snow Man.

Stevens is a poet to be savored for his language. It is a language of colors and wordplay and metrics. It has the tropical flair of a Gauguin painting. He is not a poet, like Emily Dickinson, to read for the insights. Rather, you read for the joy of the words and their uses. It's not necessary, and it was probably a motive of the poet, not to be understood but to find pleasure by.

[John Pistelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have long had an interest in Wallace Stevens but have never read him with any disciplined attention. To correct this, I read Stevens's landmark first book, Harmonium (1923), in a library copy of the Goodreads edition pictured above, along with the selections from it in The Palm at the End of the Mind, which I hope to read in its entirety before too long. The Palm was arranged (by Stevens's daughter after his death in 1955) in the poems' order of composition, while Harmonium follows its own sequence. Unless I am mistaken, I could find no grand design in Harmonium. The following review, then, will be structured according to Stevens's governing themes rather than by either volumes' ordering of the poems.

Earlier, I suggested that one way to become a literary original and overcome one's belatedness is to write as if you are two of your most radically opposed influences in one or at once. This may well be Stevens's whole secret: he writes as if Mallarmé (or do I just mean Poe?) and Whitman could be one poet: his is a formalist, decadent verse, disporting itself in pleasurable autonomous soundscapes whose non-meaning signifies the absolute—but all of it testifying to the Adamic New World power of arranging a fresh reality in primal, sensuous names.

Take "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon," in which the poet's perfumed and aristocratic inner world, like des Esseintes's or Dorian Gray's chambers, is shown to be a Whitmanian song of himself, where the self is strange even to the consciousness of it, with the democratic or Transcendentalist implication, largely absent in the European decadents and aesthetes, that we are all so endowed:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Stevens's verse is difficult; it is more readily understood than that of Crane or Moore, not because the references can all be decoded and the allegories explained, as with The Waste Land—some can, though just as often Stevens is pleasuring himself, and/or us, with words ("But ki-ki-ri-ki / Brings no rou-cou, / No rou-cou-cou")—but because he has a nearly constant subject, which is the vicissitude of the post-Romantic poet's imaginative power in twentieth-century America.

The entirety of Harmonium's long mock-epic, "The Comedian as the Letter C," concerns Crispin's, or the poet's, attempt to find an aesthetic beyond the faded Romanticism of Old Europe in an American itinerary:

Bordeaux to Yucatan, Havana next,
And then to Carolina. Simple jaunt.

"The Comedian" is self-lacerating, not only about Crispin's earlier cultural role as "general lexicographer of mute / And maidenly greenhorns" corrupted by the "distortion of romance," but also about how his quest for authenticity, for "the veritable ding an sich" or "the fecund minimum," leads him first to an aesthetic of modernist asceticism—

He gripped more closely the essential prose
As being, in a world so falsified,
The one integrity for him, the one
Discovery still possible to make,
To which all poems were incident, unless
That prose should wear a poem's guise at last.

—and then to his eventual domestic fate with poetry-blocking wife and daughters in his American colony:

Yet the quotidian saps philosophers
And men like Crispin like them in intent,
If not in will, to track the knaves of thought.

This third-person poem, epic rather than lyric, is not confessional but anti-confessional, Stevens's virtuoso rhetorical narration of his defeated double certifying that he is still a poet even if Crispin is not. It reminds me, in this way, of a Dubliners story: the author's triumphant, radiant showing-forth of his creature's defeat and paralysis (remember, MFA kids: in Joyce, the epiphany is for the reader, not for the character!).

"The Comedian as the Letter C" is certainly dazzling, and its seventeen pages took me three days at the rate of an hour a day to read properly, pencil in hand to crowd the margins, so dense is the poem with involuted meaning and rich imagery, but it is not my favorite: too much of a good thing and too provincial in its concerns, not too mention a bit too bitter for my taste (are Europe and America, and women and children, really so comical as Stevens makes them here?). I think of another poem in this volume, the nonsensically but suggestively titled "Gubbinal," a warning against emotional reductiveness, precisely because the imagination for Stevens really does make the world:

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

I like our poet better when he is briefer, more anecdotal, to refer to one of his preferred genres (e.g., "Anecdote of Canna," "Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks," "Anecdote of the Jar").

Taken together, his shorter lyrics describe the arc of his constant swing between an aesthetic of proto-Beckettian modernist minimalism or nihilism, as in "The Snow Man" and accordingly identified with the north—

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow…

—and his lush and sensuous, if always half-self-parodic and sometimes perilous-seeming, late-Romanticism or late-Decadence, associated with the south, as, for example, in "Floral Decorations for Bananas"—

And deck the bananas in leaves
Plucked from the Carib trees
Fibrous and dangling down,
Oozing cantankerous gum
Out of their purple maws,
Darting out of their purple craws
Their musky and tingling tongues.

Poetic imagination and its geography, yes, but what else does Stevens write about? The poetic imagination would not be so free to make the world if it had to contend with a divine rival: whereas the middle to late nineteenth century boasted great poetry of Christian doubt, from Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H. to Hopkins's terrible sonnets and such Dickinson verses as "This World is not Conclusion" and "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—," then Stevens is the bard of atheism.

Harmonium's famous example of this motif is "Sunday Morning," another third-person poem, about a young woman avoiding church on the Sabbath. She learns to refuse not only organized religion but also the need for any metaphysical certitude at all—to accept the finality of death as the frame that makes her experience a beautiful picture:

She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires.

The poem's pagan pedagogy is clear:

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.

Stevens's anti-ecclesiastical harmonium can play great variations on this theme. The barbaric yawp of "Ploughing on Sunday" provides another way to break the Sabbath:

Remus, blow your horn!
I’m ploughing on Sunday,
Ploughing North America.
Blow your horn!

"Ploughing," critics agree, literally means "working," figuratively signifies "writing poetry," and, as in Joyce and Nabokov, also suggests "fucking." There is moreover the astringent Hamlet-like (or schoolboy-atheist) comedy of "The Worms at Heaven's Gate," wherein the titular invertebrates deliver Badroulbadour (wife of Aladdin) to her eternal reward by disgorging the pieces of her corpse they've swallowed. More sensitively, in a very early and very Decadent poem about St. Ursula, Stevens not only diagnoses the saint's worship as a displacement of erotic desire but even imagines a suspiciously aesthetics-oriented God responding in kind to Ursula's attractions:

The good Lord in His garden sought
New leaf and shadowy tinct,
And they were all His thought.
He heard her low accord,
Half prayer and half ditty,
And He felt a subtle quiver,
That was not heavenly love,
Or pity.

The triumphant poem in this atheistical vein is "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman":

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets.

Here the speaker instructs his pious interlocutor that, all faiths being instances of the supreme fiction of poetry, "the moral law" is no more true than its pagan opposite, and that even Christian ascetics might be taught to dance. That this disturbs the old woman, the poet allows, but he grants her no quarter:

This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

I am supposed to say that this is sexist (also ageist), and I guess it is, but is it much different—except that its rhetoric is less violent!—than Woolf's murder of "the Angel in the House" in "Professions for Women" ("I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her"), or even Cather's protest against small-town small-mindedness in My Ántonia ? For the modernists, male and female, the image of middle-class domestic woman's authority over culture was an ideological tyranny no less to be overthrown than gray-bearded Victorian patriarchy.

Which brings me to my finale, Stevens and gender and sex. Much of his most vital poetry seems to be a communion with his Jungian anima; rather than anguish over the modern poet's feminized role, as in Tennyson or Browning or Dickens, Stevens enjoys figurations of female aesthetic capacity when he forgets to mock it. The best of this kind is "The Plot against the Giant," a little detumescent anti-epic, also counter-Biblical as it replaces David with a triple goddess:

First Girl

When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl

I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl

Oh, la...le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.

The south, the French language, and femality: these, ranged against an equally strong attraction to northern masculine asceticism, each bearing its own danger, mark the boundaries of Stevens's unique poetic.

Stevens is not a biographical poet, and he especially displaces the biographical in my favorite of the longer poems, "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," a supposed monologue of the poet's aged uncle reflecting on vanished desire in and out of marriage:

Like a dull scholar, I behold, in love,
An ancient aspect touching a new mind.
It comes, it blooms, it bears its fruit and dies.
This trivial trope reveals a way of truth.
Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.
Two golden gourds distended on our vines,
Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost,
Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.
We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed,
The laughing sky will see the two of us
Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains.

But its concluding credo, the speaker's resolve to study love and to appreciate especially what is most subtle, is the motive force, I think, of even this difficult modernist poet's most acerbic or recalcitrant verse:

Like a dark rabbi, I
Observed, when young, the nature of mankind,
In lordly study. Every day, I found
Man proved a gobbet in my mincing world.
Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued,
And still pursue, the origin and course
Of love, but until now I never knew
That fluttering things have so distinct a shade.

I have complained more than once about the impossibility of reading poetry, in the way one reads (i.e., finishes) a novel by coming to the end of its narrative; but poetry is still more impossible to write about. I could go on forever about poems I haven't even mentioned—"The Doctor of Geneva," "Banal Sojourn," "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock," "Cortège for Rosenbloom," "Peter Quince at the Clavier," and more—or individual lines within them. In lieu of that, let me just enjoin you, if it is great poetry you want to read, to read Wallace Stevens.

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some gems to be found in this volume;

from 'Six significant landscapes'

Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.

[c · Rating 5 out of 5]

"13 Ways of Looking At a Blackbird" was a huge game-changer for me, as it is for everybody, evidently. I was reading some rules for submission to some publisher and it had a specific rule, 1 among maybe 5, that you couldn't write "X ways of Ying at Z". So I guess that gives some idea of how big this stuff is in an outside-the-self sense of it, as if that meant anything.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

even though the man can create an image...he still is a racist and classist.

[Illiterate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stevens seeks meaning and beauty in imagination and nature, but as romanticism is no longer viable, he ironizes them with humor and wordplay.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sunday Morning

I
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

...

V

She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires.

...

VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.





Another Weeping Woman

Pour the unhappiness out
From your too bitter heart,
Which grieving will not sweeten.

Poison grows in this dark.
It is in the water of tears
Its black blooms rise.

The magnificent cause of being,
The imagination, the one reality
In this imagined world

Leaves you
With him for whom no phantasy moves,
And you are pierced by a death.


Academic Discourse at Havana
1
Canaries in the morning, orchestras
In the afternoon, balloons at night. That is
A difference, at least, from nightingales,
Jehovah and the great sea-worm. The air
Is not so elemental nor the earth
So near.
But the sustenance of the wilderness
Does not sustain us in the metropoles.
....
IV

Is the function of the poet here mere sound,
Subtler than the ornatest prophecy,
To stuff the ear? It causes him to make
His infinite repetition and alloys
Of pick of ebon, pick of halcyon.
It weights him with nice logic for the prim.
As part of nature he is part of us.
His rarities are ours: may they be fit
And reconcile us to our selves in those
True reconcilings, dark, pacific words,
And the adroiter harmonies of their fall.
How pale and how possessed a night it is,
How full of exhalations of the sea . . .
All this is older than its oldest hymn,
Has no more meaning than tomorrow’s bread.
But let the poet on his balcony
Speak and the sleepers in their sleep shall move,
Waken, and watch the moonlight on their floors.
This may be benediction, sepulcher,
And epitaph.

[António Jacinto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Não é uma poesia fácil. O jogo entre realidade e representação poética está sempre presente. Nisso, Stevens é um mestre. Conduz-nos pela linguagem e deixa-nos no plano intermédio para que ela reenvia. Que eu saiba, só Pessoa trabalhou neste campo. Mas, enquanto Pessoa privilegiou a matéria metafísica, Stevens privilegia o campo que desoculta a metáfora e a confunde com a matéria sensível. Imperdível para quem lê poesia.

[Anders · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was pretty decent. I mostly liked the nature poems and some are real bangers like 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird and The Wind Shifts. There was a bit to trudge through for me though. I didn't always love Stevens' attempt at being playful with language or to exercise his vocabulary. Someone compared Le Monocle de Mon Oncle to Eliot's J Alfred Prufrock, but I don't think it's as good at all. The long poem in here The Comedian as the letter C is kind of interesting. I feel like if I wanted to get more out of this collection I would need to do some research. So I guess all in all, just a smattering of good poems, the rest I don't have too much to say about.

[Lillian Crawford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much of Stevens’s writing is unnecessarily impenetrable/verbose, but when it sings like a blackbird it is transformative.

[Dylan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is no denying that Stevens is able to craft some unique and unconventional phrases, some of which are even occasionally good or even great. But it is clear when reading his entire collection that his is a style that becomes extremely rich in an excessive way the more Stevens abuses the whimsy of the moments that surely inspired some of these poems knocked out during his commute to and from work. His style feels often contrived and naturally like the efforts of someone who studied English as an undergraduate but who had gone on to work as an insurance company executive on the East Coast of the United States in the middle decades of the 20th century while maintaining an inner drive to somehow still reach the heights of Shakespeare. Sometimes, he is not absurdly far off from crafting a style worthy enough of carrying its own sort of comparable weight, as in the fairly underrated The Comedian as the Letter C. Other times the baroque, Epicurean nature of his imagery, combined with awkward word combinations that feel very of-the-time or, to borrow from Woolf, like "a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples", lead to empty poems that Stevens himself likely would have admitted he did not quite understand the meaning of, if there even was any to begin with (likely not). As philosophical in tone as some of his poems can feel, it is an entirely surface-level "philosophism" achieved through the density of (often-uncommon or archaic) word choice, rather than through density of thought. There is little thought in Stevens, and his poetry is an example of all style and little substance, following the example of writers like Joyce who described much of the world while saying next to nothing about it. Some of Stevens' personal quirks--like his unrestrained love of Florida, which he attempts to rhapsodize in a way that is not successfully able to universalize it in the way that Stevens supposes (no one will ever talk about Key West the way we talk about Florence, or even the provincial Stratford-upon-Avon)--are odd and perhaps a bit embarrassing. It is easy to see how Harold Bloom, with his own odd Romantic and Epicurean-leaning tastes, preferred him to Eliot. Similarly, it is easy to see why Eliot himself does not seem to have given much thought to Stevens, judging on his lack of commentary on his poetry. Despite the mixed bag of Stevens' oeuvre, Stevens is still worth considering, and there are some poems worth discovering in this collection that stand on their own as interesting contributions to the body of English-language poetry.

[Darran Mclaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember straining my brain in my American Literature class at university struggling to comprehend the meaning of Stevens poetry. I now think I might have been wasting my time because I no longer think that poetry needs to 'make sense' or have a clear and comprehensible theme. I think I may have had this revelation when I realised you don't need to understand what's going on in David Lynch's film Mullholland Drive. Wallace Stevens is a great Modernist poet. He poetry is ebuliant, sensual, intelligent and effervescent. His writing revels in the joy of language. This makes him stand in stark contrast to his contemporary TS Eliot, who was gloomy and dour. The only problem I have with Stevens is his writing is so obscure and irregular that it is difficult to get into the music of his work or for his lines to linger in your mind. This provides another stark contrast to TS Eliot because as difficult as Eliot is he was a master of making his poetry musical and rhythmic and his lines do linger in your mind.

[Rue Solomon · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 (?)

"No spring can follow past meridian.
Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss
To make believe a starry connaissance."

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Harmonium: Lazing on a Sunday morning over a cup of coffee, a woman considers and questions her religious beliefs.

You may read online here.

[Brad · Rating 1 out of 5]

Should have been called Snore-onium. Hey-o!

[Jenny · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Snowman and Sunday Morning are the stand-outs for me.

[Sanjuro · Rating 3 out of 5]

A poet more for the mind than the soul. I found myself liking a minority of the poems, but the collection is so long that this still left me with a number of poems that I enjoyed a great deal.

[Justin Goodman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Normally I have a lot to say (or at least research enough to have something worth saying) about a book I finished reading. But Wallace Stevens has been an influence on me for half my life, a portion of time which will become increasingly dramatic as I get older and it becomes three-quarters of my life, and so I'm not sure I can say what that makes this collection to me exactly. And as a poet that's been in the American purview for nearly a century, there's not much I can say about Stevens.

Stevens himself is a stand-out figure for a poet in that no compelling mythos could be composed from his life. It was the staid, well-off life of a Harvard graduate who lived in suburbs and worked in the insurance industry. He stopped talking to his parents until his father died because they didn't like his wife. Occasionally he went to Florida.

For all intents and purposes, he was a patrician rooted in conservative notions unsurprising for a suburban white American. Even his trips to Florida are very northeasterner. D.L. Macdonald highlights this in his essay on Stevens, but you can even see this fairly explicitly in his poetry. Despite how coy and playful he wrote (and it's very coy and very playful), he was a man obsessed with the idea of a world with a central meaning which we spin centrifugally around. From "Domination of Black":

I heard them cry—the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

It's an obsession on par with Gerard Manley Hopkins, if you lay "God's Grandeur" side by side with "Carrion Comfort". And you can even see this development with Stevens' additions to Harmonium. In 1923, he ends the collection with the phrase "speak it." As if unsatisfied with this conclusiveness, this ability and command to speak, in 1931 he added several poems, with the new final poem's final line: "Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu,/nor on the nunnery beaches."

In the end, Harmonium is a testament to Stevens' inveterate restlessness. A restlessness that he seemingly only experienced and fulfilled on paper. And I can find no better testament to the strangeness of this work than the fact that harmonium is an instrument that, in order to produce soft-timbred and comically breathy sounds, requires varying amounts of forceful compression to move air through. Yes, Stevens was a windbag, but this is also exactly what Aeolus gave Odysseus.

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Stevens wrote nothing else, he would still be one of my favourite poets.

...That isn't a very profound statement, as I haven't read nearly as much poetry as I'd like. Still, the essence of his work has something very attractive to me in poetry, or rather, in how I imagine poetry to be. Though Wallace Stevens is considered a Modernist, he stands decidedly apart from poets like Pound or Eliot. He has their same elite education and erudition that is broth inseparable from the poetic stew, and his poetry is oftentimes similarly difficult as a result. Well, I'd say his poetry is always difficult, though not always because of the density of reference. Stevens makes his work appear ephemeral, half-blent in air. I have little direct knowledge of Eastern philosophy or spiritualism but I get that sensibility in his work, and it's more of an undercurrent than it is Pound's 'I'm going to write in Chinese even though I'm not fluent'.

At his worst, Stevens' difficulty has the effect difficulty always has - it pushes the reader away, either discouraging them entirely or making them feel they must work at an understanding, even a basic one. I'm not against that, but I treasure (and I think many others do too) the immediate impact of a poem, that the opaque and inscrutable sometimes denies. 'The Emperor of Ice Cream' is one of Stevens' most famous poems, but it isn't a favourite of mine because I did background reading very quickly after initially reading the poem, and some interpretations of unusual poems bring in thought and language one never expected upon that first reading. I felt locked out of approaching that particular poem personally as a result. Deciding an equilibrium of re-reading and research in looking at a poem is something I haven't done yet, though I'm aware it is a tool in my reader's kit I must sharpen for myself.

At his best, Stevens inspires in the grandest and most primordial sense of the word. Quiet revelations. A joy located only within poetry. As maligned (and justifiably so) Instapoetry is, its intent is a snapshot of an aesthetic or a mood; a word photograph. Language is so painful because it is only semi-private, and words born from within without are hollowed. Your feelings sound stupid and shallow. You regret having them. Good poetry transcends fraught boundaries of language. Stevens makes his personality resonate with your own, without a sacrifice on either end.

What more is there to desire in an artist?

[Casimir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stevens' use of sound and colour is really masterful. Throughout Harmonium a visual and more broadly sensory poetic grammar becomes evident, linking poems with each other, giving each occurence of colour (eg. purple, yellow, blue) additional depth. There is a common feeling to reading Stevens' various poems which does not preclude them from emoting a variety of distinct impressions. The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician was probably the one which struck me most, its distinct imaginational fingerprint returning to me two months after reading the collection.

Another interesting aspect of Stevens' poetry is the construction of enunciators, or personæ as Pound put it, which involves Stevens in a particular current of American poetry. The characters which numerous poems are built upon: the Emperor of Ice-Cream, the Metaphysician, etc. find a very particular expression in the self-contained universe of a single poem. The prose-like quality of some of Stevens' work does not dilute the concentrated evocative power of the Word, but it does make for very agreeable and comfortable reading.

I did have a bit of trouble with some of the lengthier poems, not those of twenty or thirty lines but which extend over multiple double pages. The depiction of the sea and the lady on the sea was jumbled in my head as I read one such poem and I did not find it to be as powerful as were other ones of medium length. I know however that this is a personal view—one which is inherited from my personal poetics and does not discredit the great pleasure I had of reading Harmonium.

Overall, the collection is very heteroclite and no two images are the same. Stevens imbues his work with a chanted, oral quality which probably proceeds from his "spontaneous" method of writing: he has said that his most enduring work is that which came to him and which he wrote down in one go, not thinking to plan words or meaning. As a result, some poems go on for quite a while, presumably because Stevens played around with the image and evolved it, to the point where I lost interest. The style and matter of Stevens' poems remains very modern and evocative, eliciting a strong reaction of the imaginative mind, and that alone commends the work.