Wallace Stevens, Harmonium

Antonio José Jiménez Muñoz

Ed. by Erik Martiny, Paris Science et Lettres
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1923

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection

Resources

Although Wallace Stevens began writing poetry seriously around the beginning of the century, when he was a student at Harvard, Harmonium (1923) was his first collection of poems, which he published at the age of forty-four. Despite being heavily influenced by English Romanticism and the French symbolists, the poems in the volume nevertheless represent a serious attempt to forge a distinctively American voice, an American vernacular for poetry both in themes and poetic diction. It collects seventy-four poems of various metres, from the short, four-line poem “To the Roaring Wind” to the long, six-section “The Comedian as the Letter C”, most of which had been already published between 1914 and 1923 in various magazines. Most …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

3422 words

Citation: Jiménez Muñoz, Antonio José. "Harmonium". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 October 2012 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4849, accessed 23 November 2024.]

Save this article