Harmonium is a book of poetry by American poet Wallace Stevens. His first book at the age of forty-four, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. This collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines ("Life Is Motion") to several hundred ("The Comedian as the Letter C") (see the footnotes for the table of contents). Harmonium was reissued in 1931 with three poems omitted and fourteen new poems added. Most of Harmoniums poems were published between 1914 and 1923 in various magazines, The poems are now in the public domain in America and similar jurisdictions. Initial reception in 1923 The book's first edition sold only a hundred copies before being remaindered, suggesting that the poet and critic Mark Van Doren had it right when he wrote in The Nation in 1923 that Stevens' wit "is tentative, perverse, and superfine; and it will never be popular." Yet by 1960 the cottage industry of Stevens studies was becoming a "multinational conglomerate", more than fulfilling Van Doren's prophecy that some day a monograph would be written that would pay tribute to Stevens' "delicately enunciated melody, his economy, his clipped cleanliness of line, his gentle excellence." A library search in the twenty-first century at a typical university could be expected to bring up about 200 books under the topic "Wallace Stevens". The Wallace Stevens Journal has been published by the Wallace Stevens Society since 1979 and its editor, John N. Serio, has collected some of the journal's essays in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens. An audiobook of his complete public domain poems was completed by Librivox in 2007. Critical assessments Poet and editor Harriet Monroe, who founded Poetry magazine in 1912, wrote in 1924, [T]here was never a more flavorously original poetic personality than the author of this book. If one seeks sheer beauty of sound, phrase, rhythm, packed with prismatically colored ideas by a mind at once wise and whimsical, one should open one's eyes and ears, sharpen one's wits, widen one's sympathies to include rare and exquisite aspects of life, and then run for this volume of iridescent poems. The poet Marianne Moore, Stevens' lifelong ally and friend, wrote shortly after the book's publication of Stevens' "achieved remoteness" of imagination, likening the poems to a painting that Tu Muh commented upon: Powerful is the painting... and high is it hung on