Still Whipping Hullabaloos among Spheres

• Published in: The Wallace Stevens journal 2023-10, Vol.47 (2), p.131-143
• Main Authors: Eeckhout, Bart, Gargaillo, Florian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aiken, Conrad (1889-1973); American literature; Literary history; Literature; Poetry; Poets; Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)
• ISSN: 0148-7132; 2160-0570; 2160-0570
• DOI: 10.1353/wsj.2023.a910912

Moore was quick to embrace, among other things, Harmonium’s “sharp, solemn, rhapsodic elegant pieces of eloquence” (48), the “riot of gorgeousness in which Mr. Stevens’ imagination takes refuge” (49), the “masterly equipoise” of a poem such as “Sunday Morning” (50), the recurrent display of “precise diction and verve” (51), and Stevens’s capacity to let the “expanded metaphor” in “The Comedian as the Letter C” become “hypnotically incandescent like the rose-tinged fringe of the night-blooming cereus” (52). If the collection would always appeal to a much smaller audience than The Prophet, its artistic status was likewise destined to overshadow Gibran’s book within the elite circles of published poets, academic students of literature, musicians, painters, and highly educated amateur readers who developed a taste for it. [...]in 1967, Princeton University Press published the first study devoted solely to Stevens’s collection and its extended genesis: When Stevens’s debut appeared, Bob was a three-month-old baby, and when the adult Bob (who grew up to be as tall for his generation as Stevens had been for his) published his study of Harmonium, he was in turn in his forty-fourth year, just as Stevens had been when his first book came out. Because of these close ties between critic and book, and by way of a further editorial tribute, we thought we should take a brief moment to look back on Bob’s study here.