Stevens trained to be a lawyer. Within eleven years after this series of poems were written, he was vice-president at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in Connecticut. He continued to pursue a quiet life of poetry and correspondence and for the remainder of his life he nurtured his contemplative habit of observation and writing as he walked from home to work and back again. Few at Hartford knew of his world acclaim as a poet. While his major work is considered to have been written when he was much older, many of these early poems are firm classics in the American poetic canon, including: “Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Snow Man,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and many others. Stevens died of cancer in 1955, shortly after receiving that year’s Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

These poems originally appeared in a variety of magazines (Others, Secession, Rogue, The Soil, The Modern School, Broom, Contact, The New Republic, The Measure, The Little Review, The Dial, and particularly in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.) Nearly 70 of the 101 published poems were later collected in Steven’s first published collection of poems, HARMONIUM. These poems were written before 1923. Summary by Alan Davis-Drake

Anecdote of Canna	01:00
Anecdote of Men by the Thousand	01:18
Anecdote of the Jar	01:04
Another Weeping Woman	01:06
The Apostrophe to Vincentine	01:42
Autumn	00:47
Banal Sojourn	01:32
Bantam in Pine-Woods	01:15
The Bird with the Coppery Keen Claws	01:36
Bowl	00:54
Carnet de Voyage	04:11
Cortege for Rosenbloom	01:50
The Cuban Doctor	00:51
The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician	01:02
Depression Before Spring	00:47
Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock	01:02
Domination of Black	01:33
Earthly Anecdote	01:08
The Emperor of Ice Cream	01:25
Explanation	00:49
Exposition of the Contents of a Cab	01:08
The Florist Wears Knee-Breeches	00:56
Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs	01:29
From a Junk	00:51
From the Misey of Don Joost	01:00
Gray Room	01:09
Gubbinal	00:54
Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores	01:17
Home Again	00:36
Hymn from the Watermelon Pavilion	01:24
In Battle	00:55
The Indigo Glass in the Grass	00:50
Infanta Marina	00:58
Invective Against Swans	01:12
Life Is Motion	00:41
The Load of Sugar-Cane	00:48
Lulu Gay	01:04
Meditation	00:53
O, Florida, Venereal Soil	01:54
Outside the Hospital	01:25
The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage	01:40
Peter Quince at the Clavier	03:30
Phases	02:07
The Place of the Solitaires	01:05
Plowing on Sunday	01:08
The Snowman	01:12
Song-There Are Great Things Doing	00:36
Tattoo	00:53
Tea	00:42
Theory	00:47
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird	03:26
To the Roaring Wind	00:33
Valley Candle	00:43
The Wind Shifts	01:01

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