Harmonium.

Harmonium (1923) is the debut poetry collection of Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) and one of the foundational volumes of American literary modernism — a book whose initial commercial failure and ultimate canonical triumph constitute one of the more remarkable reversals in the history of American letters. Published in a run of 1,500 copies, the first edition sold only a hundred copies before being remaindered, and the poet and critic Mark Van Doren predicted in The Nation that Stevens's wit was "tentative, perverse, and superfine" and would never be popular — a judgment that proved spectacularly wrong. The eighty-five poems gathered in the collection — among them "Sunday Morning," "The Snow Man," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and "Anecdote of the Jar" — announced a poetic sensibility of extraordinary originality: an extraordinary vocabulary, a flair for memorable phrasing, an accomplished sense of imagery, and the ability to both lampoon and philosophize, all filtered through an imagination shaped in equal measure by the French Symbolists, the Imagists, and Stevens's own peculiarly American preoccupation with the relationship between reality and the transforming power of the mind. His Collected Poems (1954), which drew heavily on Harmonium and the work that followed it, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955, and Stevens received the National Book Award for Poetry twice, vindicating a career that had begun in near-total public indifference.