On this day in 1937, Wallace Stevens published his fourth book of poetry, The Man with the Blue Guitar. Stevens was a lawyer with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company for almost forty years, and he was forty-four when he published his first book of poetry. This was Harmonium, a collection which included some of his most anthologized poems -- "Domination of Black," "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" -- but which sold fewer than 100 copies at the time. It was dismissed by its New York Times reviewer as a "glittering edifice of icicles" within which "there is not an idea that can vitally affect the mind, there is not a word that can arouse emotion ... FULL STORY »
