A review by casparb
Harmonium by Wallace Stevens

WS's debut collection and in many ways a hit from the beginning. I'm aware of a few who say that Harmonium hasn't aged well - or at least that it's a lot more difficult to see it as revolutionary these days as compared to 1923. Probably that's true to certain extents though I think it's helpful to have read something like Williams' Spring and All for context. But Stevens is brilliant and this collection, early as it is, draws that out. He sounds such a poet of jazz to me too, modal jazz. I played some Coltrane with it & would recommend. He has a mind embedded in the classical etymology which he flashes at times ("Vocalissimus") but elsewhere he's working at something resembling the slow introduction of Japanese poetry to American lit in the early 20th - as in the classic Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Has any poet since thought so explicitly on the concept of anecdotal Form?
He's My Guy when he's at the sea. His monisms bleed into each other