Christian Wiman, in his comments of Stevens
for theAtlantic Monthly, claimed that scholars
have appreciated Stevens’s poetry more than the
reading public. He praised Stevens’s ‘‘dense, highly
wrought’’ poems that are ‘‘full of otherworldly
beauty’’ but faulted them for their ‘‘hothouse, over-
intellectualized quality.’’ Many other critics, how-
ever, disagreed. J. Hillis Miller, in his article on
William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens for
theColumbia Literary History of the United States,
found ‘‘a thematic continuity’’ in Stevens’s ‘‘abid-
ing concern with the interactions of imagination
and reality, or mind and world.’’ David Clippinger
wroteinhisarticleonStevensinTwentieth-Century
American Nature Poets, ‘‘Stevens is now regarded
alongside Pound as on of the main pillars in twen-
tieth-century American poetry.’’ Clippinger
claimed that Stevens’s ‘‘place as a major poet is
assured by the sheer force of his poetic statements
about the world and the latent power of the imag-
ination.’’ He concluded that his poetry has become
‘‘a paradigm for the ‘Thinking Life’ that provides a
sense of solace and completeness that is so elusive
when one lives in a reality devoid of imagination
and poetry.’’ Ned Balbo in ‘‘Wallace Stevens and
the Abstract’’ forArt Journal, asserted that Ste-
vens’s ‘‘poems are gorgeousin the literal sense of
the word: filled with sumptuous images, exotic
references, and vivid, fully imagined settings; they
provide a banquet of language that can be humor-
ous, ironic, earnest, or all of these.’’
Stevens’s first volume of poetry,Harmonium,
published in 1923, is considered one of his finest.
David Perkins, in his chapter on Stevens for
A History of Modern Poetry, stated that many of
the poems in this volume are ‘‘brilliant’’ in their
creation of ‘‘a comic world of artificial simplicity,
high spirits, humourous exaggeration, parody,
Dandy sophistication, affectation, archness, bur-
lesque, and fairytale fantasy.’’
‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ has earned less commen-
tary than Stevens’s more famous poems, such as
‘‘Sunday Morning’’ and ‘‘The Idea of Order at Key
West,’’ but some critics have singled it out as a
fine expression of Stevens’s philosophy on theDepression-era food line(FPG / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
Of Modern Poetry