Harmonium
Stevens' debut, written by a Hartford insurance executive in his spare time, is among the most purely pleasurable collections in American poetry. "Sunday Morning," "The Snow Man," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" established a voice that was philosophical, musical, and drenched in color. Stevens asked the hardest question: can a secular person, having lost God, still live with beauty? His answer was yes, and the answer was poetry itself.
The Comedian as the Letter C, the long centerpiece, is the single most divisive poem in the book. Detractors call it overlong and self-indulgent even as other readers name it a highlight. Several readers who love the short lyrics say the longer, discursive poems lose them completely; one dismisses the collection outright as “all style and little substance.” More than one reviewer flags specific poems for racial and class condescension and treats it as a real cost of reading the book now, with one reader blunter still: “he still is a racist and classist.” A period critic hedged even the praise, calling the wit “tentative, perverse, and superfine; and it will never be popular,” and at least one modern reader agrees enough to retitle the whole thing “Should have been called Snore-onium.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
