Books: First Poems

Poets Keep on Publishing Books HARMONIUM — Wallace Stevens — Knopf ($2.00) matches its odd, bright cover. The titles of the poems show the mood, Peter Quince at the Clavier, The Comedian as the Letter C, Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion, Colloquy with a Polish Aunt, "princox, citherns, toucans, gasconade." Intellectual gymnastics, the tight-lipped playfulness of a strange imagination, sonatas for the piccolo—much that is merely sterile grotesquery — occasionally individual beauty, unfashionably arrayed but genuine—half-a-dozen or a dozen poems, firm-fibred, original, distinguished, ensuring for Mr. Stevens a small but positive niche...