Wallace Stevens, Music Technology, and the Resonance of Poetry

Abstract Wallace Stevens titled his first poetry collection, Harmonium (1923), after a nineteenth-century musical instrument: the American reed organ. The title frames the book as a period piece, an emblem of a bygone age, but also as a musical instrument, a tool for producing new performances in the present. This tension, bound up in the history of the reed organ and the book that bears its name, can help us interpret a similar tension in contemporary poetry studies, where scholars of historical poetics seek to read poetic form against the media conditions of narrow historical moments, and proponents of New Formalism stress the importance of experiencing poetic sound and rhythm in real time. This essay, building on Stevens’s example, argues that the concept of acoustic resonance can help reconcile synchronic and diachronic methodologies and thereby generate sophisticated new ways to analyze poetic sound.