When Wallace Stevens published Harmonium in 1923 it was strange for a few reasons. He was a relatively unknown New England insurance lawyer, he was releasing his first collection at the age of forty-four, and he was not easily associated with any school or movement. But above all the poems were simply very peculiar, mingling romantic and modernist tendencies in a manner that remains obscure at its centenary. Those who think the older Wallace Stevens spent too long writing in his own manner overlook the fact that he arrived late, not dressed in the appropriate fashion, with the feeling of someone who had been speaking to himself for years.

He also came reluctantly. In 1922 he wrote to Poetry magazine editor Harriet Monroe: ‘Gathering together the things for my book has been so depressing that I wonder at Poetry’s friendliness. All my earlier things seem like horrid cocoons from which later abortive insects have sprung. The book will amount to nothing, except that it may teach me something.’ He would later record the ‘horror’ that attended his reading of proofs. This is distinct from modesty, or the poet’s inevitable sense of inadequacy. The hesitance springs from the task Stevens had set himself, addressing a subject that could rarely be conveyed clearly.

That objective is something that can only be hedged at, often in terms Stevens himself employed: imagination, poetry, clarity. His syntax often suggests a philosophical argument, but the constituent disquisitions rarely amount to a plain statement. Take the closing lines of ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’

Every ...