Wallace Stevens

Harmonium Wallace Stevens

2019 Reprint of 1923 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. His first book at the age of forty-four, Harmonium was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 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"). Harmonium was reissued in 1931 with three poems omitted and fourteen new poems added. Wallace Stevens is one of America's most respected poets. He was a master stylist, employing an extraordinary vocabulary and a rigorous precision in crafting his poems. But he was also a philosopher of aesthetics, vigorously exploring the notion of poetry as the supreme fusion of the creative imagination and objective reality. Because of the extreme technical and thematic complexity of his work, Stevens was sometimes considered a willfully difficult poet. But he was also acknowledged as an eminent abstractionist and a provocative thinker, and that reputation has continued since his death.