The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens

Acclaimed biographer and poet Paul Mariani gives us a perceptive, enlightening biography of Wallace Stevens, perhaps the most important American poet of the twentieth century. His first and perhaps most influential book of poems, Harmonium, was not published until he was forty-four, but in it Stevens drew on his profound understanding of Modernism to create a distinctive and inimitable American idiom. He stoically endured an increasingly unhappy marriage, and yet had a witty, Dionysian side; he was at once both the Connecticut businessman and the hidalgo lover of all things Latin.

The complexity of his poetry can be challenging, but Stevens has proven time and again to be one of the most richly rewarding poets to engage. Biographer and poet Paul Mariani shows how, over the course of his life, Stevens sought out the sun-drenched ineffable in what is often mistaken merely for the quotidian.