Wallace Stevens was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.
In folklore, a will-o'-the-wisp, will-o'-wisp or ignis fatuus is an atmospheric ghost light seen by travelers at night, especially over bogs, swamps or marshes. The phenomenon is known in English folk belief, English folklore and much of European folklore by a variety of names, including jack-o'-lantern, friar's lantern, hinkypunk and hobby lantern, and is said to mislead travelers by resembling a flickering lamp or lantern. In literature, will-o'-the-wisp metaphorically refers to a hope or goal that leads one on but is impossible to reach, or something one finds sinister and confounding.
Harmonium is a book of poetry by American poet Wallace Stevens. His first book at the age of forty-four, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. This collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred. Harmonium was reissued in 1931 with three poems omitted and fourteen new poems added.
"The Worms at Heaven's Gate" is a poem from Wallace Stevens' first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published in 1916 and is therefore in the public domain.
"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first collection of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1922, and is in the public domain. Stevens' biographer, Paul Mariani, identifies the poem as one of Stevens' personal favorites from the Harmonium collection. The poem "wears a deliberately commonplace costume", he wrote in a letter, "and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it".
"Peter Quince at the Clavier" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. The poem was first published in 1915 in the "little magazine" Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, edited by Alfred Kreymborg.
"Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1918.
"Homunculus et la Belle Etoile" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1919.
"O Florida, Venereal Soil" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in the journal Dial, volume 73, July 1922, and is therefore in the public domain.
"The Apostrophe to Vincentine" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published before 1923 and is therefore in the public domain according to Librivox.
"Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published in 1921 according to Librivox and is therefore in the public domain.
"Sunday Morning" is a poem from Wallace Stevens' first book of poetry, Harmonium. Published in part in the November 1915 issue of Poetry, then in full in 1923 in Harmonium, it is now in the public domain. The first published version can be read at the Poetry web site: The literary critic Yvor Winters considered "Sunday Morning" "the greatest American poem of the twentieth century and... certainly one of the greatest contemplative poems in English".
"The Place of the Solitaires" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in the journal Poetry in October, 1919, so it is in the public domain.
"The Weeping Burgher" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. Originally published in 1919, it is in the public domain.
"The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was originally published in 1919, so it is in the public domain.
"The Virgin Carrying a Lantern" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was one of the few Harmonium poems first published in that volume, so it is still under copyright. However, it is quoted here as justified by fair use to facilitate scholarly commentary.
"Cortege for Rosenbloom" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book, Harmonium. First published in 1921, it is in the public domain in the United States and similar jurisdictions.
"Hymn From A Watermelon Pavilion" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1917, so it is in the public domain.
"Sea Surface full of Clouds" is a poem from the second, 1931, edition of Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1924, so it is restricted by copyright. However, brief parts of it are quoted here as fair use, and the whole poem is available elsewhere on the Internet.
"Lunar Paraphrase" is a poem from the second (1931) edition of Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. One of Stevens's "war poems" from "Lettres d'un Soldat" (1918), it is in the public domain.