Harmonium (poetry Collection) - The Gaudiness of Poetry

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". (Later, in 1939, he wrote a letter expressing fondness for "Fabliau of Florida".) The gaudiness of color images is striking in such poems as Domination of Black and Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock, which also associate Stevens with the imagist movement in early twentieth-century art. There may be a link between the gaudiness of poetry and the title of the book. His original choice was The Grand Poem: Preliminary Minutiae, but he may have chosen the title Harmonium for its eponymous relation to a harmonium — that is, a gaudy little organ-like calliope, suggesting Calliope, muse of poetry. Note also the Adagia thesis that words are "the only melodeon".

The gaudiness of Stevens's poetry endears him to many, even those who, with a wink, profess to be among his enemies. It has earned him the sobriquet "the Matisse of poets". Buttel particularly, with reference to Sunday Morning and Matisse's Odalisque paintings, is insistent on Stevens and Matisse as kindred spirits. Others are impressed by his affinity with Klee, viewing Stevens as sharing Klee's delight in the playful and evocative ways in which a minimal use of color and scene could create much larger panoramas. "The colors and linear forms in Stevens' poetry evoke images that dance and tease the imagination," Feinstein writes, "in much the same way as the visual images in Klee's paintings."

Marianne Moore favored a comparison to Rousseau, likening the effect that Stevens was trying to achieve with "Rousseau's paintings of banana leaves and alligators". Floral Decorations for Bananas nicely illustrates Moore's comparison. Another example of the painterly virtues of Stevens's Harmonium poems is The Apostrophe to Vincentine, which Buttel views as an instance of Stevens's practice of evoking reality through resemblances between the world and the visual or tactile qualities of paintings. Another example is Explanation and its allusion to Chagall.