Harmonium (poetry collection)

Harmonium is a book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens. His first book, it was published in 1923 (by Knopf) when he was in middle age (forty-four years old). Its first edition sold only a hundred copies before being remaindered. Most of its poems were published between 1914 and 1923 in other magazines.^[1] So most are now in the public ___domain in America and similar jurisdictions, as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act affects only works first published after 1922.^[2]

Earthy Anecdote  Every time the bucks went clattering  Over Oklahoma  A firecat bristled in the way.  Wherever they went,  They went clattering,  Until they swerved  In a swift, circular line  To the right,  Because of the firecat.  Or until they swerved  In a swift, circular line  To the left,  Because of the firecat.  The bucks clattered.  The firecat went leaping,  To the right, to the left,  And  Bristled in the way.  Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes  And slept.

Introductory Puzzles

For reasons that perplex critics Harmonium begins with "Earthy Anecdote".^[3] This poem must be "some sort of manifesto," Helen Vendler speculates, "but of what was it the proclamation?"[3]

Similar puzzles surround the second poem in Harmonium, "Invective against Swans". Why would Stevens write an insult poem slamming swans? Why the aspic nipple in the third poem, In the Carolinas? What manner of nude "scuds the glitters" on a weed? ("The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage") Who is the giant ("The Plot Against the Giant") and why can he be undone by heavenly labials? What is a "gubbinal"? Why does the listener in The Snow Man become "nothing himself" and behold "the nothing that is"? And so on.

Some Evaluations

Harriet Monroe wrote in 1924,

[T]there never 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.^[4]

Marianne Moore wrote shortly after the book's publication that Stevens "achieved remoteness" of imagination, which "takes refuge" in a "riot of gorgeousness." She adds that although "Mr. Stevens is never inadvertently crude, one is conscious...of a deliberate bearishness — a shadow of acrimonious, unprovoked contumely."^[5] Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Republic in 1924, wrote, "Even when you do not know what he is saying, you know that he is saying it well."^[6] Matthew Josephson ranked Stevens among the best of contemporary poets, writing in 1923 that Stevens exhibits both a poetry of sensuousness and a metaphysical poetry. He favors the latter, as in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and "Anecdote of the Jar", predicting that they will be "spell-binding for hundreds of years".^[7] (By contrast Charles Altieri has recently expressed a preference for the poetry of sensuousness, Stevens matters as a poet, according to Altieri, because of his commitment to the primacy of the senses.[4]) 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. He defended Stevens' "obscurity" as deriving from "a wealth of meaning and allusion."^[8] He discerns a poet "definitely out of tune with life and with his surroundings, and...seeking an escape into a sphere of finer harmony between instinct and intelligence." Fletcher warned that the poet faced "a clear choice of evils: he must either expand his range to take in more of human experience, or give up writing altogether. Harmonium is a sublimation which does not permit a sequel."^[9] Louis Untermeyer 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 "Chieftan 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. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs." ^[10] To the caricature of "aesthete" Gorham Munson added "dandy" in "The Dandyism of Wallace Stevens" (Dial 79, 1925), objecting to what he took to be Stevens's indifference to political and social issues of the era. The epithet "dandy" became "hedonist" in Yvor Winters's 1943 essay "Wallace Stevens, or the Hedonist's Progress", objecting that Stevens did not give primacy to the intellect or to orthodox Christian beliefs.^[11]

The Poetry of Sensuousness

Favoring Harmonium's "sensualism", as exampled in "Metaphors of a Magnifico", marks a divide among critics, for there are many who, like Vendler, champion the later poetry. "I think, with others, that Stevens' powers increased with age," she writes.^[12] Also there are those like Bates who agree that Harmonium absorbs the poses and preoccupations of the fin-de-siècle "naughtiness" and its echo in the "English Decadence" as transmitted and refracted through Stevens's own unique sensibility, but 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."^[13] Some of the issues here are raised by a poem like "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock". Josephson chooses these lines from "Banal Sojourn" to illustrate Stevens's poetry of sensuousness:

The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black.
The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air.
Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.
Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew...

Josephson's objection to this side of Stevens is that he in his next book "would have to be more and more intimate and scandalous, ad absurdum", and that already this side "has influenced many of his younger contemporaries, and in them, at least, leads to pretense, and murkiness."^[14]

Imagism

Buttell shows how Stevens absorbed such diverse traditions and innovations as Romanticism, Victorianism, Elizabethan comedy, French irony, Symbolism, Imagism, and Modernist art. Although Stevens had reservations about the Imagist movement, the movement's injunction "Use no superfluous word" is evident in such poems as "The Snow Man" and "The Load Of Sugar-Cane". Edward Kessler's Images of Wallace Stevens organizes Stevens's use of images into six categories: North and South, Sun and Moon, Music and the Sea, the Statue and the Wilderness, and Colors and "Domination of Black".

On Stevens's "symbolism"

Stevens is often called a symbolist poet. Vendler notes that the first task undertaken by the early critics of Stevens was to "decode" his "symbols". (The scare-quotes are Vendler's.) Color symbolism is a vital part of Stevens' poetic technique, according to a symbolist critic^[15] writing in 1975, who proposed the following color scheme for reading Stevens.

blue - imagination;
green - the physical
red - reality
gold - sun
purple - delight in the imagination

Vendler accuses the decoders of producing "some commentary of extraordinary banality".^[16] It seems safe to affirm however that Stevens's symbolism is in aid of a polarity between "things as they are" and "things imagined".^[17] Imagination, order and the ideal are often symbolized by blue, the moon, the polar north, winter, music, poetry, and art. Actuality and disorder are often represented by yellow, the sun, the tropic south, summer, physical nature. For instance, sun and moon represent this duality in Harmonium's "The Comedian as the letter C", in which the protagonist, Crispin, conceives his voyage of self-discovery as a poet to be

An up and down between two elements,
A fluctuating between sun and moon,

On the relevance of biography

At least as controversial as the question about symbolism is the question whether and how Stevens's personal life should be read into his poetry. William Carlos Williams was not reluctant to do so, writing some months after Stevens's death, "He was a dandy at heart. You never saw Stephens in sloppy clothes. His poems are the result."^[18] The remarkable Le Monocle de Mon Oncle is particularly disputed with regard to the relevance of the biographical. Referring to the fact that Stevens's 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."^[19] Stevens's interest in Chinese art, notably the prints of Utamaro (See canto III of "Monocle") is discernible in his poetry, as in Harmonium's "Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores"? Should the reader note this and move on, or does it fortify the critiques of Stevens's aestheticism?^[20] Buttel offers a nuanced judgment when he writes, "Purging the excesses of this [orientalist] mode from his verse, he became attracted to the dazzling color and exotic qualities of the American South, the Caribbean, Latin America, and modern French painting. Even so, orientalism left its mark on Harmonium, in delicacy of effect and in such details as `Utamaro's beauties,' `umbrellas in Java,' and `a woman of Lhassa.'"^[21]

The gaudiness of poetry

In a letter written in 1933 Stevens selects "The Emperor of Ice Cream" as his favorite among his poems because it contains something of "the essential gaudiness of poetry".[5] (There may be a link between the gaudiness of poetry and the title of the book: A harmonium could be described as a gaudy little organ-like musical instrument, or indeed as a calliope, suggesting Calliope, muse of poetry.) The gaudiness of Stevens' poetry endears him to many (even those who profess to be among his enemies [6]) and has earned him the sobriquet "the Matisse of poets", although it is arguable that Klee's paintings had more influence on his poetry. In a letter written in 1939 Stevens expressed fondness for "Fabliau of Florida". The use of color images is striking in such poems as "Domination of Black" and "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock", associating Stevens with the imagist movement in early twentieth-century art.

Stevens might also be called "the Vivaldi of poets" because of the importance to him of the seasons and weather generally. Harold Bloom chides Vendler for writing in On Extended Wings that "the only phenomenon to which he [Stevens] is passionately attached is the weather", replying, "If Mrs. Vendler were wholly correct, readers deeply moved by Stevens might have to murmur that never has so much been made out of the weather."[7]. Responding to the seasons, nature, and the world generally is the work of the imagination, whether the poet's or anyone else's, and failure of imagination is associated with death, as in "Another Weeping Woman".

The Vivaldi of poets has also been accused of "some hazy notion of an analogy between music and poetry."[8] Whether hazy or not, the notion colors such poems as Harmonium's "Peter Quince at the Clavier", "Ploughing on Sunday", and Infanta Marina, which Vendler likens to a "double scherzo". She also observes that for Stevens "looking and hearing, imagery and musicality, occupy equal ground".^[22] This sensuous ground contrasts with rationalism and abstraction, as in the contrast he presents between the philosophers' Plato and "the ultimate Plato" in "Homunculus et la Belle Ètoile".

Irony and Humor

Stevens the ironist should not be overlooked. Irony (arguably) suffuses "The Ordinary Women", "Invective Against Swans", "Nuances of a Theme by Williams", and other poems in Harmonium. Also a sense of humor is a significant characteristic of the collection, as indicated by many of the poem titles and in some cases by the content as well. Both title and content of "Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges" testify to this lighter side. (Samuel French Morse writes that nothing Stevens was to write later would achieve "the particular comic quality of these early exercises" in Harmonium, though the tone of the poetry would deepen.^[23]) Even Stevens's 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 dimension of Harmonium is reflection on the relationship between traditional European artistic tradition and the new artistic experiments in America to which Stevens was self-consciously contributing. "Doctor of Geneva" can be read as such an experiment.

Locality

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. On the other (dramatically different) hand, Nicholson reads it as an anecdote about planet Earth. The bucks are spinning planets and the firecat is the Sun — so the poem's title is a pun.

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".^[24] If chaos is just the opposite of his idea, Nicholson's astronomical interpretation might fall under the same censure, and perhaps Vendler's "poet's struggles" reading as well. Martha Strom's approach may be more in line with Stevens's idea. She explains the position of the poem at the beginning of Harmonium as signifying Stevens's departure from the dominant "local" school, which enjoined the poet to stay close to his roots and locale. She writes,

Stevens locates the bucks in Oklahoma, which firmly situates the poem in the "local" school of writing, but he imbues the localist donnée — a particular landscape, some bucks, and a cat in Oklahoma — with the motion of his imagination, and the flat "local" scene acquires texture and life.^[25]

This departure from the strictures of "locality" reaches its telos in the final poem that Stevens wrote for Harmonium, "The Comedian as the Letter C", in which the poet voyages away from his local soil.

Notes

1. Bevis, H.: "...sixty-seven of the seventy-four poems of the 1923 Harmonium had first been published in small magazines between 1914 and 1923."
2. 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]
3. First published in 1918. See Buttel, p. 76. See also Librivox.[2]
4. Monroe, 28
5. Axelrod and Deese, p. 4
6. Axelrod and Deese, p. 4
7. Axelrod and Deese, p. 4
8. Axelrod and Deese, p. 4
9. Axelrod and Deese, p.4
10. Untermeyer, p 30
11. Possibly the most disgruntled reviewer of Stevens's early poems was the Irish-American poet Shaemas O'Scheel, the author of an Irish war poem, "They Went Forth to Battle, But They Always Fell." Stevens had a set of poems in Poetrys "War Number" (November 1914). O"Sheel condemned the entire "War Number" but cited Stevens's "Phases" in particular as "an excellent example" of poetry that is "untruthful, and nauseating to read." (Axelrod and Deese, p. 1)
12. Vendler, p. 5
13. Richard Eberhart, quoted in Bates, p. 89. Bates may have been thinking of Marianne Moore's remark about Stevens's "bearishness".
14. Josephson, 32
15. Prasad, pp. 1-10; précis in The Wallace Stevens Journal, p. 138.
16. Vendler, p. 53.
17. Heringman, p. 325
18. Bates, p. 90.
19. Bates, p. 82.
20. Stevens, H., p. 796: "I hate orientalism." (letter from Wallace Stevens to Paule Vidal, August 19, 1953.)
21. Buttel, p. 73-4
22. Vendler, p. 48.
23. Morse, p. 33.
24. Steven, H. Letter to Carl Zigrosser, July 10, 1918. p. 209
25. Strom, p. 429.

References

• Axelrod, Steven Gould, and Helen Deese. Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens. 1988: G.K. Hall & Co.
• Bates, Milton J. Wallace Stevens: a mythology of self. 1985: University of California Press.
• Bevis, William W. "The Arrangement of Harmonium". ELH Vol 37, No 3 (1970).
• Buttel, Robert. Wallace Stevens, The Making of Harmonium. 1967: Princeton University Press.
• Heringman, Bernard. "Wallace Stevens: The Use of Poetry". ELH Vol. 16, No. 4 (1949)
• Josephson, Matthew. "Review of Harmonium". Reprinted in Axelrod and Deese.
• Kessler, Edward. Images of Wallace Stevens. 1972: Rutgers University Press.
• Monroe, Harriet. "Comment: A Cavalier of Beauty". Reprinted in Axelrod and Deese.
• Morse, Samuel French. "Wallace Stevens, Bergson, Pater". ELH Vol. 31, No. 1.
• Nicholson, Mervyn. "Reading Stevens' Riddles." College English, Vol. 50, No. 1. (Jan., 1988), pp. 13-31.
• Prasad, Veena Rani. "Color-Scheme in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens". Indian Journal of American Studies. January/July 1975, pp. 1-10.
• Stevens, H. Letters of Wallace Stevens. 1966: University of California Press
• Vendler, Helen. Words Chosen Out Of Desire. 1984: University of Tennessee Press.
• The Wallace Stevens Journal. "Current Bibliography." Volume 1, Numbers 3-4. (Fall/Winter 1977)