Landmark Books in All Fields
ItemID: #117276
Cost: $9,500.00

Harmonium

Wallace Stevens

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

STEVENS, Wallace. Harmonium. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923. Octavo, original half blue cloth, original checked paper boards, paper spine label, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box. $9500.

First edition of Wallace Stevens' first collection of poems, one of only 500 copies in the rare first binding, especially rare and desirable in the original dust jacket.

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. Four-page publisher's catalogue from the year of publication laid in. Edelstein A1a-1. Owner signature.

A bit of foxing along fore-edge, book about-fine; rarely present original dust jacket with a bit of expert reinforcement on verso, some closed splits along folds, slightly toned spine, front panel clean and bright, exceptionally good.

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