[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

TGIF is POETS for those without initiative. Make it happen. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Wallace Stevens started late. His first poetry collection held an impressive, by debut poetry collection standards, eighty five titles, but when the book, Harmonium, was published in 1923, its author was in his early forties. He’d had time to backlog.

I covered Stevens’s morning routine—composing in his head as he walked to his office at Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company—in this space three years ago. In Harmonium, he wrestles with how he should see the world. Should he be grounded in the rational or loose in the imagination? The question is posed piecemeal and never resolved.

I remember when Donna Tartt’s A Secret History came out. My mother’s kitchen table review was that it’s a great book, but she put all she’s ever learned and considered into it and she won’t have anything else to say for five to ten years. That was in 1992. Tartt’s second book came out in 2002. Stevens spends a great deal of energy trying to sort himself. He wrote sparingly through the 20s, not writing regularly again until 1933 and not publishing another bound volume until Ideas of Order in 1936. Harmonium received harsh reviews. Mark Van Doren dismissed him from the genre by writing in The Nation, per Wikipedia, that Stevens’ wit “is tentative, perverse, and superfine; and it will never be popular.” There were nice things written too, but the negatives weighed on him. Maybe he, like Tartt in Mom’s pinning, spent his store. Maybe the critics brushed him back. Maybe he had to reconcile vers libre with actuary tables.