Harmonium (Masterplots, Revised Second Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Wallace Stevens
- First Published: 1923
- Type of Work: Poetry
- Genres: Poetry
- Subjects: Tradition, Twentieth century, Nature, Art or artists, Poetry or poets, Modernism
Critical Evaluation:
In 1923, when Wallace Stevens’ 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...
[The entire page is 2286 words long]
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