Harmonium (poetry collection)

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 footnotes[1] for the table of contents).

[4] The book's first edition sold only a hundred copies before being remaindered,[5] 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.

[10] 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.

[18] "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.

"[19] 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.

[21]) Louis Untermeyer, suspicious of international influences on American poetry, criticized Stevens in 1924 as a "conscious aesthete" at war with reality, achieving little beyond "an amusing precosity".

He can only "smile indulgently" at the "childish" love of alliteration and assonance in "Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan" or "Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns", and he is irritated by the confusing titles: "The Emperor of Ice Cream", "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage", "Frogs Eat Butterflies.

[22] On the evidence of the exquisite miniature "Tea", Alfred Kreymberg had been led to expect a "slender, ethereal being, shy and sensitive", according to Milton Bates, who continues, "the poet he actually met at a social gathering for Rogue contributors stood over six feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds".

[28] Josephson chooses these lines from "Banal Sojourn" to illustrate Stevens' poetry of sensuousness: The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose.

[29] There are those who maintain that both the aesthete and sensualist readings overlook the American burgher in Stevens, the successful insurance executive possessed of "something of the mountainous gruffness that we recognize in ourselves as American—the stamina, the powerful grain showing in a kind of indifference".

[30] This character trait may be reflected in the element of anti-poetry in Stevens' work, as in his choice of the word 'stupid' in "Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores", or the "tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk" of "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman".

[33]Allen Tate suggests a different interpretation in maintaining that Stevens' dandyism was "the perfect surface beneath which plays an intense Puritanism".

"[25] The upshot of Vendler's syntactical approach is to situate his poems in the realm of possibilities and potentialities, according to Beverly Maeder, who credits her with pointing the way.

Also orienting the poems away from certainties about an unproblematically given world are similes with like or as, the hypothetical as if, the modal might, the conditional, sentence fragments, optatives, questions and protean usage of the verb to be (as when an observer beholds "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is".

Referring to the fact that Stevens' marriage to Elsie turned cold, Milton Bates writes, "Emotional deprivation became to some extent the condition of his craft, the somber backdrop for the motley antics of Harmonium.

See also "Two Figures In Dense Violet Night" which can be read as a humorous anecdote about the gauche male, or a meditation on the lover's otherness, or the poet's challenge to the imagination of the reader.

He redirects the longing to know a transcendent realm into nature itself, salving the frustrated platonic desire with his poetic gifts, notably the non-discursive effects borrowed from sound and sight, music and painting.

There is an issue about whether Stevens converted to Christianity on his deathbed[47] but his poetry predominantly expresses a naturalistic outlook in which the religious longing for eternal bliss is channeled into a poetic response to nature.

The gaudiness of color images is striking in such poems as "Domination of Black" and "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" which also associate Stevens with the imagist movement in early twentieth-century art.

[59] Essayist Llewelyn Powys also pursues this notion, finding that "each unexpected verbal manipulation conceals some obscure harmony of sense and sound which not only provokes intellectual appreciation, but in the strangest possible way troubles the imagination".

Both title and content of "Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges" testify to this lighter side.

[62] Even Stevens' experimentation with perspective, coolly executed in "The Snow Man", is presented with bawdy humor in a poem like "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman".

Another aspect of Stevens' sense of humor is the cleverness of such poems as "Anecdote of Canna" and "Hymn From a Watermelon Pavilion" which subtly exploit within-a-dream scenarios.

A few poems from Harmonium, on no account excluding "The Comedian as the Letter C", "O Florida, Venereal Soil", "Bantams in Pine Woods", "Palace of the Babies" and "Theory" are occasionally mentioned as examples of pataphysics, an attempt to go beyond metaphysics that is sometimes cited as responsible for the high tides of language in Stevens' poetry.

Many would agree with Simon Critchley, who favors a broadly Kantian reading, that Stevens was the philosophically most important poet writing in English in the twentieth century.

[61] As for Earthy Anecdote, Vendler believes that "this apparently trivial little poem" revealed to Stevens how much his art depended on obstructions and the consequent swerves they provoked.

Stevens is on record as saying that he "intended something quite concrete: actual animals, not original chaos", commenting on Walter Pach's illustration for his poem, which he judged "just the opposite of my idea".

She explains the position of the poem at the beginning of Harmonium as signifying Stevens' departure from the dominant 'local' school, which enjoined the poet to stay close to his roots and locale.