Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium recently turned a hundred. When Knopf published this brashly youthful and original first book of poems in September 1923, the poet himself was hardly youthful, and he was known only to a few modernist cognoscenti from his poems in little magazines such as Poetry, Others, and The Little Review. Nor did Stevens look like a poet. A firebrand on the page, in person Wallace Stevens in 1923 was a portly, clean-shaven, forty-four-year old executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, working hard to support his wife in a comfortable house in Hartford. “I am far from being a genius — and must rely on hard and faithful work,” he had explained to her, referring not to his poetry, in which she had little interest, but to his legal labors with bonds and surety claims.
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