Still Whipping Hullabaloos among Spheres

Still Whipping Hullabaloos among Spheres Bart Eeckhout and Florian Gargaillo Allow,Therefore, that in the planetary sceneYour disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,Proud of such novelties of the sublime,Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,May, merely may, madame, whip from themselvesA jovial hullabaloo among the spheres. —Wallace Stevens, “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” WALLACE STEVENS’S first book of poems, Harmonium, was published by Alfred A. Knopf on September 7, 1923, less than a month shy of the poet’s forty-fourth birthday. It didn’t exactly make a splash. Though Mark Van Doren in The Nation predicted that someday a monograph would be written about it (and other contemporary volumes), and that Stevens’s work would be more “durable” than much of what “passed for poetry in his day,” he still called Harmonium “tentative, perverse, and superfine,” and wondered out loud, “What public will care for a poet who strains every nerve every moment to be unlike anyone else who ever wrote[?]” (40). Van Doren’s skepsis about the book’s ability to find an audience seemed to be borne out at first. Robert Rehder recalls how, “During the 1924 Christmas season, two young poets, Richard Blackmur and Conrad Aiken, found that the first edition had been remaindered in the basement of Filene’s, the Boston department store, at 11 cents a copy.” (The regular asking price was $2, the equivalent of $35 a century later according to the US Inflation Calculator.) Blackmur and Aiken recognized the book’s merit and bought all the copies to send as Christmas cards to their friends. The poet took a more ironic view of the book’s sales. Around July 1924, he wrote to Harriet Monroe: “My royalties for the first half of 1924 amounted to [End Page 131] $6.70. I shall have to charter a boat and take my friends around the world” (L 243). (Rehder 36) Recognition was slow to arrive, then, but it did arrive over time. Today, a first printing of Harmonium fetches anywhere between $2000 for a copy in not very good shape and $6000 if it’s in better condition and includes the rare dust cover jacket. Stevens’s friends around the world typically gather nowadays in countries he never managed to visit himself, though they usually forget to charter a boat. A special commemorative issue such as this can even find itself edited by a Belgian and a Frenchman collaborating across two continents. Then again, Rehder’s anecdote is telling not only for how it recalls the languishing copies of Harmonium in the belly of Filene’s: it also reminds us how Blackmur and Aiken, as fellow poets, already knew better than to leave the remaindered books on the table. Another up-and-coming poet who had just published her own first volume, Marianne Moore, was simply bowled over by Stevens’s idiosyncratic gifts. Her review of Harmonium, published in the January 1924 issue of The Dial, aligned Stevens’s artistry resolutely with Shakespeare’s “nutritious permutations” (51). Moore was quick to embrace, among other things, Harmonium’s “sharp, solemn, rhapsodic elegant pieces of eloquence” (48), the “riot of gorgeousness in which Mr. Stevens’ imagination takes refuge” (49), the “masterly equipoise” of a poem such as “Sunday Morning” (50), the recurrent display of “precise diction and verve” (51), and Stevens’s capacity to let the “expanded metaphor” in “The Comedian as the Letter C” become “hypnotically incandescent like the rose-tinged fringe of the night-blooming cereus” (52). From the start, Harmonium seemed primed to become at least a poet’s poetry. At the end of this introduction, we include the yellow-and-red dust cover jacket that was wrapped around Harmonium’s 1923 harlequin hard-board reproduced on our cover. The back of this dust cover jacket, too, adds a snippet of literary context that qualifies the sense of dismal failure we might derive from Rehder’s selected anecdotes. Getting published by Alfred (and Blanche) Knopf as part of their Borzoi Poetry series was a promising imprimatur for a budding poet: in the same Fall 1923 season, it put Stevens...