"A LANDMARK VOLUME IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY": VERY SCARCE FIRST EDITION OF HARMONIUM, ONE OF ONLY 500 COPIES IN THE RARE FIRST BINDING

STEVENS, Wallace. Harmonium. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923. Octavo, original half blue cloth, original checked paper boards, paper spine label, uncut. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. $3800.

First edition of Wallace Stevens' first collection of poems, one of only 500 copies in the rare first binding.

Although Stevens had been publishing poems in magazines for almost ten years, Harmonium, published when he was 44 years old, was his first collection. Harmonium includes some of Stevens' most famous poems, such as "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Ploughing on Sunday," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "Sunday Morning" and "The Snow Man." "Harmonium is a landmark volume in modern American poetry… 'The poet's subject is his sense of the world,' Stevens once wrote…he believed in the ultimate value of imagination, in the ability of the imagination to transform reality" (Hamilton, 520). First issue, with red top edge. Without extremely scarce dust jacket. Edelstein A1a-1.

Text very clean, gentle toning and slight rubbing to edges of bright boards. An attractive copy in the uncommon first binding.