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Harmonium (Faber Poetry)

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Wallace Stevens first revealed his genius in 1923, when his first collection of poetry "Harmonium" was released. While it was only the first part of his career as a poet, Stevens' first book is in some ways his best -- despite being a little uneven, "Harmonium" has a rough, passionate quality.

"At night, by the fire,/The colors of the bushes/And of the fallen leaves,/Repeating themselves,/Turned in the room,/Like the leaves themselves/Turning in the wind," writes Stevens in "Domination of Black," a display of the beauty and eerieness of his work. And Stevens sticks to that in poems like "Infanta Marina" ("Her terrace was the sand/And the palms and the twilight"), the steamy beauty of "O Florida, Venereal Soil," or the eerie surreality of "Tattoo."

While lush, rich poetry was what suited Stevens the best, "Harmonium" also has some more minimalist poetry, such as the sparse "Gubbinal" ("The world is ugly,/And the people are sad"). And one of his rare strikeouts is the confusing "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad." Even these are not bad, just not as good as they could be.

Virtually anyone can write poetry -- the trick is writing something that stirs the reader, or at least makes them think. Stevens had a rare gift for poetry, and that gift propelled him into fame during his own lifetime. It isn't much of an exaggeration to say that he was one of the great poets of the twentieth century.

Stevens dips into both free verse and rhyming poetry, without sticking solidly to anything for any period of time. At times his poetry is just an intellectual pleasure, without any rhyme or rhythm. But in "Le Monocle De Mon Oncle," he creates a poem with an almost hymnlike quality -- solemn, ornate and thoroughly beautiful.

It's the descriptions that really make his poetry shine. He paints almost everything with color -- sapphire seas, gilt umbrellas, electric fireflies, rotted skulls, and how a "red bird flies across the golden floor." And with lines like "the light is like a spider./It crawls over the water," Stevens also gave his poetry a note of the dreamlike.

Richly surreal and beautiful, "Harmonium" is a remarkably polished first collection. Wallace Stevens wasn't yet at his peak in the years before 1923, but with "Harmonium" he became a must-read.

This is one of those rare volumes, like the 'Lyrical Ballads' of Wordsworth and Coleridge which announces to the world the arrival of a new major Poet. Not all thought so at the time. And many found Stevens too dandified and precious to be a major voice. But among the poems of this collection are among the most beautifully colorful musical creations in Modern Poetry.

This volume contains the following Poems:
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 Suger-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
Foral 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 he 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 Wind
Poems 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

Among these are a number of the signature- poems of Stevens: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, The Emperor of Ice- Cream, Peter Quince at the Clavier, To the One of Fictive Music,Anecdote of the Jar, Bantams in Pine- Wood, The Snow Man, Sunday Morning.
My own personal favorite is : Peter Quince at the Clavier . The poetry of its music is among the most deeply felt and colorful in all Stevens work. Its concluding Stanza rings in my mind at this moment.
"Beauty is momentary in the mind-
The fitful tracing of a portal
But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; The body's beauty lives,
So evenings die, in their green going,.
A wave interminably flowing
So gardens die their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter
done repenting .
So maidens die to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.

Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Off those white elders: but escaping
Left only death's ironic scraping.
Now in its immortality it plays upon the clear viol of her memory
And makes a constant sacrament of praise."

Stevens intense musicality, his love of color, the delicate intricacy of his long lines, his precise intellectual playing in searching for the Ideal in the Real, his seeming to make even Beauty a necessary fiction- all these and more- make him one of the most interesting and greatest of twentieth- century American poets.