Harmonium (poetry collection)

First edition

Harmonium is a book of poetry by American poet Wallace Stevens. His first book at the age of forty-four, it 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") (see the footnotes[1] for the table of contents). Harmonium was reissued in 1931 with three poems omitted and fourteen new poems added.[2]

Most of Harmonium's poems were published between 1914 and 1923 in various magazines.[3] The poems are now in the public domain in America and similar jurisdictions.[4]

  1. ^ From the table of contents for Harmonium in Frank Kermode and Joan Richards, editors, ix–xi:
    • 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 Sugar-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
    • Floral 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 the 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 WindPoems 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
  2. ^ Heyen, William. p. 147. The poems from the 1923 that were omitted from the 1931 edition are "The Silver Plough-Boy," "Exposition of the Contents of a Cab" and "Architecture". Those introduced in the 1931 edition are "The Man whose Pharynx was bad," "The Death of a Soldier," "Negation," "Sea Surface full of Clouds," "The Revolutionists Shop 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" and "Indian River".
  3. ^ Bevis, H.: "...sixty-seven of the seventy-four poems of the 1923 Harmonium had first been published in small magazines between 1914 and 1923." The first edition of Harmonium has this in its front matter: "The poems in this book, with the exception of The Comedian as the Letter C and a few others, have been published before in Others, Secession, Rogue, The Soil, The Modern School, Broom, Contact, The New Republic, The Measure, The Little Review, The Dial, and particularly in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, of Chicago, edited by Harriet Monroe." (Edelstein, p. 3)
  4. ^ See Buttel for details about the publication dates of individual poems. See also the LibriVox site for the complete public domain poems of Wallace Stevens.[1] Archived 2010-10-13 at the Wayback Machine