Harmonium (poetry Collection) - A "flavorously Original Poetic Personality"

A "flavorously Original Poetic Personality"

Poet and editor Harriet Monroe, who founded Poetry magazine in 1912, wrote in 1924,

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.

The poet Marianne Moore, Stevens's lifelong ally and friend, wrote shortly after the book's publication of Stevens's "achieved remoteness" of imagination, likening the poems to a painting that Tu Muh commented upon:

Powerful is the painting... and high is it hung on the spotless wall in the lofty hall of your mansion."

"Sea Surface full of Clouds" illustrates this quality. Although Joan Richardson's reading makes the case that the poem's "true subject" is an extended holiday that Stevens and his wife, Elsie, took in the fall of 1923, and specifically that the true subject is the poet's sexuality, rather it is the powerful "poetry of the subject" that displays Stevens's genius and draws readers to the poem, as Tu Muh was drawn to the painting.

Moore casts Stevens as an explorer of the exotic who 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." Stevens seems to admit as much in "The Weeping Burgher". The Death of a Soldier may have been one of the poems she had in mind, because of its almost brutal naturalism.

Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Republic in 1924, spoke without pretence for most readers of Stevens: "Even when you do not know what he is saying, you know that he is saying it well." This 'Wilson effect' is no doubt linked to Stevens's Adagia aphorism, "Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully." Colloquy with a Polish Aunt is a good candidate for a Wilson award.

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". 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. "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.