Poetry
Harmonium
Wallace Stevens · 1923
Opening lines
Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Seventy-four poems, brief pieces alongside long poems, in a vocabulary drawn from all quarters: rare words, titles in French, onomatopoeia. The roller of fat cigars is called in to whip creams in the cups of the kitchen, while a dead woman lies under a sheet in the house, and it is decreed that the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. A blackbird is looked at in thirteen ways. A woman stays at home one Sunday morning, in a dressing gown, among her oranges and her cockatoo, and wonders why she should give the dead the best of what she has.
Context
The volume was published by Knopf in September 1923, in an edition of fifteen hundred copies; it was its author's first book, and he was forty-three. Most of the poems had already appeared in magazines, chiefly in Poetry. Stevens then published little for about twelve years. In 1931 a revised edition appeared, from which he had removed three poems and to which he had added fourteen.
Who it is for
A collection in difficult language and rare vocabulary, in which short pieces alternate with long poems. Translated into French by Claire Malroux, in a bilingual edition.
Prizes and reception
About a hundred copies sold on publication. Harriet Monroe welcomed the book; Mark Van Doren and Louis Untermeyer expressed reservations.
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