FIRST ISSUE BINDING OF A MODERNIST LANDMARK
STEVENS, Wallace. Harmonium. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1923.
8vo. Original cloth-backed boards with a checked pattern in blue, red, yellow and white with beige title label to spine and top-edge red; pp. 11 [iii], 15-140 [iv]; covers a little rubbed at the edges and light bleeding of red top-edge onto front flyleaf with spine label lightly tanned and lacking dustwrapper, otherwise very good.
~b~First edition, one of only 500 in this first issue binding
Harmonium was Wallace Steven's first book and a Modernist landmark. It is a collection that contains more than 50 poems which exercise the full ingredients of his genius.
A lawyer by trade, Stevens became an associate of the prestigious artistic community in New York alongside names like Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams but was distinguished from most other aspiring artists by his long-standing and impressive career pursuits. Having studied at the New York School of Law from 1901 to 1904, he would go on to achieve success in the realm of Insurance Law and in 1916 joined Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he would remain Vice President from 1934. He never abandoned his post despite the fact that by the 1950's, he was considered one of the most crucial contemporary poets.
Harriet Monroe, founder and leading editor of the periodical Poetry, reviewed Harmonium~i~ as such: “The delight which one breathes like a perfume from the poetry of Wallace Stevens is the natural effluence of his own clear and untroubled and humorously philosophical delight in the beauty of things as they are.”
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