Harmonium by Wallace Stevens

First published: 1923; expanded, 1931

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

In 1923, the year Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium was published, the French Symbolists Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue were being assimilated as influences and models in English poetry as well, and the imagist movement had not yet run its course. Because Stevens exhibited the tangential imagery, elisions, and regard for symbolic order of the first group and the concentrated exactness of the second, most readers found little in his poetry to link it with the native tradition. Instead, they seized on the exotic and ornate qualities of his verse as if these were its final effect rather than a means to an end.

Stevens appears to be, at first reading, a poet whose purity of vision and absolute integrity insulate him from the material concerns of his society. In thus assuming a position of isolation and authority, he resembles T. S. Eliot in England and James Joyce in Paris. The author of “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” “The Comedian as the Letter C,” and “Peter Quince at the Clavier” seems to provide a similar image of the dedicated artist.

As it later developed, Stevens was neither a master of decor for decoration’s sake—the literary dandy and James Whistler in words, as some called him—nor the alienated poet the period demanded. An aesthetic-moral writer of the highest order, he had already in Harmonium charted those areas of experience and precept that were to form the whole body of his work: the re-creation of the physical world in bold and brilliant imagery, the relation of imagination to reality, the nature and function of art, the poet’s place in modern society, and problems of structure and style.

Stevens was not a poet of growth but of clarification, and his later books merely order and refine his vision and techniques. Unlike most poets, who achieve only a temporary balance between temperament and environment, he created a total world for his imagination and his belief in the nourishing power of art. Perhaps the greatest service he provides is to show the possible in poetry if humans are to find a source of imaginative faith in an age of disbelief or to establish once more a sustaining relationship with the world about them. Harmonium “makes a constant sacrament of praise” to poetry—the imaginative ordering of experience—as the supreme fiction.

The unmistakable signature of these poems is the richness of their diction, the use of words not common (at least in those plain-speaking times) to English poetry, and a parade of brightly colored images and startling turns of phrase. Such words as fubbed, coquelicot, barque, phosphor, gobbet, fiscs, clavier, pannicles, girandoles, rapey, carked, diaphanes, unburgherly, minuscule, ructive, shebang, cantilene, pipping, curlicues, and funest reveal the poet’s delight in the unusual and the rare. As R. P. Blackmur pointed out long ago, however, Stevens’s poetic vocabulary was not chosen for affected elegance, coyness, or calculated obscurity. These words give an air of rightness and inevitability within what frames them. It is not the word itself but its relationship to other words in the poem that gives to Stevens’s poetry its striking qualities of style. The same is true of his images, the strategic effectiveness of “barbaric glass,” “poems of plums,” “venereal soil,” “golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,” “rosy chocolate and gilt umbrellas,” “oozing cantankerous gum,” “women of primrose and purl,” and “the emperor of ice cream,” which convey a luxuriance of sense impressions. This diction of odd angles of vision and strange surfaces gives the impression of language revitalized as if it were the invention of the poet himself. The diction becomes a part of what Stevens once called “the essential gaudiness of poetry,” and it is capable of a variety of effects, as the following examples show: “The mules that angels ride come slowly down/ The blazing passes from beyond the sun” (“Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”) or “Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan/ Of tan with henna hackles, halt!” (“Bantams in Pine-Woods”), or the following, from “The Snow Man”:

and not to thinkOf any misery in the sound of the wind,In the sound of the leaves,Which is the sound of the landFull of the same windThat is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,And, nothing himself, beholdsNothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Stevens’s diction and imagery are not so much the verbalization of a mode of thought but in themselves a way of thinking. His poetry belongs to the order of solipsism, that philosophical theory that holds that the self is the only object of verifiable knowledge and that all things are re-created in the image of the human act of perceiving the world. This is the effect toward which Stevens’s floating images tend, so that the reader emerges from the world of his verse with an altered perspective. There is in it a different way of seeing, a rearrangement of the familiar pattern of experience; poetry is no longer a way of looking at life but a form of life itself. Thus, his images point to a passionate drive toward material comfort and rich living, as opposed to spiritual sterility in a world of waste and excess.

In Harmonium the poles of his world become “our bawdiness unpurged by epitaph” and “the strict austerity of one vast, subjugating, final tone.” Stevens is aware of tradition corrupted and a world fallen into disorder, a realization of humans dispossessed of unity between themselves and their universe, of nature violated, of old faiths gone. Out of his knowledge he writes these lines on a Prufrock theme:

In the high west there burns a furious star.It is for fiery boys that star was setAnd for sweet-smelling virgins close to them.The measure of the intensity of loveIs measure, also, of the verve of earth.For me, the firefly’s quick, electric strokeTicks tediously the time of one more year.And you? Remember how the crickets cameOut of their mother grass, like little kin,In the pale nights, when your first imageryFound inklings of your bond to all that dust.

For a secular poet like Stevens, poetry was to become the “supreme fiction” and the imagination “the one reality in this imagined world,” a way of imposing order on the chaos of experience. This is the theme of “Anecdote of the Jar,” one of the simplest but most meaningful of the poems in Harmonium: “I placed a jar in Tennessee,/ And round it was, upon a hill./ It made the slovenly wilderness/ Surround that hill.” Here is the desire to impose order on the wildness of nature and, indirectly, on that of the world. It is not the image of the jar that is of first importance in the poem, but the act of placing the jar on such an eminence that it commands the landscape, so that “It took dominion everywhere./ The jar was gray and bare./ It did not give of bird or bush,/ Like nothing else in Tennessee.” Stevens puts John Keats’s Grecian urn to other uses than those of contemplation or revelation.

This rage for order is worked out in more elaborate detail in “The Comedian as the Letter C.” A fable in six parts, the poem is Stevens’s most ambitious work before “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” on the relation of imagination to reality and the poet’s place and function in society. It is characteristic of his self-satire that he should picture the poet as a picaresque mountebank trying to reconcile imagination to actuality. In part 1, “The World Without Imagination,” Crispin the subjectivist sets sail upon the sea of life, to discover that the romantic imagination that has given him eminence within his own limited milieu is a world preoccupied with things and therefore lacking in imagination. Romanticism being equated with egotism, Crispin in the second section, “Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan,” decides that the only reality lies in the senses. His love for the exotic ends when he realizes the overwhelming and destructive powers of nature. The third section, “Approaching Carolina,” follows Crispin through a realm of the imagination symbolized by moonlight that is the antithesis of the sun, which lights up reality.

Turning from the moon as a mere reflection of reality, Crispin in part 4, “The Idea of a Colony,” enters a new phase of art based on the community and regional ties. Disillusioned, in part 5, “A Nice Shady Home,” he turns to domesticity and, like Candide, digs in his own garden; he will become a philosopher. Part 6, “A Daughter with Curls,” deals with the final wisdom Crispin found in his return to Earth.

Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout.The world, a turnip once so readily plucked,Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed outOf its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main,And sown again by the stiffest realist,Came reproduced in purple, family font,The same insoluble lump.

Art, Stevens implies, cannot be made this or that, cannot be pursued like a chimera; it exists, separate and complete, in its own substance and shape.

There are times when Stevens’s search for some standard of ultimate reality and the forms that it may take in poetry leads him away from concrete particularities into the realm of abstract speculation. If he appears at times more concerned with meaning than with being, the reader may also recognize in his work the power of a contemplative writer who insists on the need of discipline in life as in art. He sees the gap between the potential and the actual; consequently, he must try to uncover causes and create a way of seeing that his readers may share.

Stevens himself achieves the supreme, fictive mood of contemplation and understanding in “Sunday Morning,” perhaps his best poem and one of the great poems of the century. In the image of a woman eating her late breakfast on a Sunday morning, Stevens gives a picture of modern boredom and uncertainty. The woman sits in external sunlight but also in the moral darkness of an age that has lost faith in the spiritual nature of human beings: “Why should she give her bounty to the dead?” The poet’s answer is that happiness lies in the perception of nature, which in its recurrent changes and seasons creates an immortality in which humans may share.

We live in an old chaos of the sun,Or old dependency of day and night,Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,Of that wide water, inescapable.Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quailWhistle about us their spontaneous cries;Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;And, in the isolation of the sky,At evening, casual flocks of pigeons makeAmbiguous undulations as they sink,Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Harmonium reveals Stevens to be a poet of moral and humane temper. The poems, disciplined and perfectly articulated, reflect a limited but significant picture of the twentieth century sensibility.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. Places Stevens’s work within the broader context of American poetry. Interprets Stevens in the light of Bloom’s theory of literature, which has an Aristotelian slant. Three full chapters are devoted exclusively to Harmonium.

Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught. The Violence Within / The Violence Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Refutes the image of Stevens as an aesthete removed from the world whose poetry displays elements of sexism and racism. Traces three phases of Stevens’s poetic development, in which he used realism, discussed the future, and presented an “almost feminist” vision.

Cook, Eleanor. A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007. Includes a chapter examining Harmonium, providing an introductory head note, annotations on difficult phrases and references, and an analysis of each poem. Includes a brief biography of Stevens and a detailed appendix on reading modern poetry.

Holander, Stefan. Wallace Stevens and the Realities of Poetic Language. New York: Routledge, 2008. Examines Stevens’s differing uses of language in his poetry. Focuses on the 1930’s, when his work expressed a need for possible social engagement and for language with a political utility.

Levin, Jonathan. “Wallace Stevens: Harmonium.” In A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006. An analysis of Harmonium, describing how Stevens sought to create a new Romantic poetry by combining elements of Romanticism and modernism in his work.

Litz, A. Walton. Introspective Voyager: The Poetic Development of Wallace Stevens. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. One of the clearest and most enjoyable general studies. Chronicles the stages of Stevens’s poetic development, and provides lucid discussions of many Harmonium poems.

MacLeod, Glen G. Wallace Stevens and Company: The Harmonium Years, 1913-1923. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1983. Examines Stevens’s crucial involvement with major art and literary movements in the years up to Harmonium, and shows how his perspective on art is a major element in the collection’s poems. Looks at echoes of these movements in the poems.

Riddel, Joseph N. The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens. 1965. Reprint. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. Solid, insightful close readings, covering many Harmonium poems. Examines Stevens’s definitions of the imagined and the real in his work. This book remains among the most useful studies for beginning readers of Stevens.

Serio, John N., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. The essays explore various aspects of Stevens’s poetry, including discussions of Stevens and his contemporaries, Romanticism, philosophy, linguistic structure, belief, and the feminine. Harmonium is examined in an essay by Robert Rehder.

Vendler, Helen Hennessy. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems. 1969. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Classic study of Stevens’s long poems. Provides excellent readings of the three long poems in Harmonium, “Sunday Morning,” “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” and “The Comedian as the Letter C.” Most later critics cite this easily accessible, straightforward work. A fine place to begin research.