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.
Stevens at his gaudiest: fubbed girandoles, concupiscent curds, a lexicon that sends you to the dictionary and returns you no wiser. 'The Comedian as the Letter C' spends nearly six hundred lines on self-delighted word-music that even devotees skip. The feeling underneath is real but kept at glacial remove; you admire these poems long before any of them moves you.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
