There may be always a time of innocence. 
There is never a place.

Which is real--
This bottle of indigo glass in the grass, 
Or the bench with the pot of geraniums, the stained
        mattress and the washed overalls drying in the sun? 
Which of these truly contains the world?

Neither one, nor the two together.

from Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue[A sculpture of horses in a park is being contemplated ( Read more... )

Jumbo
by Wallace Stevens

The trees were plucked like iron bars
And Jumbo, the loud general-large
Singsonged and singsonged, wildly free.
Who was the musician, fatly soft
And wildly free, whose clawing thumb
Clawed on the ear these consonants?

Who the transformer, himself transformed,
Whose single being, single form
Were their resemblances to ours?

( Read more... )

The main Harmonium poems are always going to be his most popular, aren't they? I think it's because they're so assimilable to other tacks than his own. In his later volumes he's so deep in his thing that if you aren't also you won't enjoy the poetry. But the early verse, while still giving his view of the world, gives it so ambiguously and ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace StevensI ( Read more... )

1924 essay by a frustrated Edmund Wilson.

March 19, 1924

Harmonium, by Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $2.00.


( Read more... )

This is the first Stevens poems I memorized, and definately one of my favorites ( Read more... )

The Snow Man ( Read more... )