The Great War and Post-Romantic Ambition

Abstract

Abstract “Well a book of poems is a damned serious affair,” counseled Stevens in a letter William Carlos Williams printed in the prologue to Kora in Hell (1918). Ostensibly responding to Williams’s earlier volume Al Que Quieri!, Stevens really described the tentative progress of his own work: “to fidget with points of view leads always to new beginnings and incessant new beginnings lead to sterility.” Stevens would delay his own book of poems until 1923. And he began the decade of active publishing that led to Harmonium with the same measured consideration with which he settled into a profession.