as "this greatest of living and of American poets". Possibly the most disgruntled reader of Stevens' early poems was the Irish-American poet Shaemas O'Scheel, the author of an Irish war poem, "They Went Forth to Battle, But They Always Fell". Reviewing Stevens' poems that appeared in the "War Number" (November 1914) of the journal Poetry, O’Sheel, writing in a competing journal, condemned the entire "War Number" but cited Stevens' "Phases" in particular as "an excellent example" of poetry that is "untruthful, and nauseating to read". Favoring Harmoniums "sensualism", as exampled in "Metaphors of a Magnifico", marks a divide among critics, for there are many who, like Helen Vendler, champion the later poetry. "I think, with others, that Stevens' powers increased with age", she writes. Josephson chooses these lines from "Banal Sojourn" to illustrate Stevens' poetry of sensuousness: The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black. The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air. Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom. Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew... Josephson's objection to this side of Stevens is that he in his next book "would have to be more and more intimate and scandalous, ad absurdum", and that already this side "has influenced many of his younger contemporaries, and in them, at least, leads to pretense, and murkiness". There are those who maintain that both the aesthete and sensualist readings overlook the American burgher in Stevens, the successful insurance executive possessed of "something of the mountainous gruffness that we recognize in ourselves as American—the stamina, the powerful grain showing in a kind of indifference". This character trait may be reflected in the element of anti-poetry in Stevens' work, as in his choice of the word 'stupid' in "Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores", or the "tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk" of "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman". "There are in Stevens many moments rich in beauty", Robert Rehder writes, "but he does not want them to be too sweet and resists 'the bawds of euphony'". Stevens' fondness for American locale helps him temper many such moments. A poem like "The Jack-Rabbit" illustrates his affection for rural and frontier America and the native folk tradition, leaving no doubt that his poetry is rooted in America. Poems like "Ploughing on Sunday", "The Doctor of Geneva" and "Bantam in Pine-Woods" are an