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Out of the Lock-Up

Michael Wood: Wallace Stevens, 2 April 1998

Collected Poetry and Prose 
by Wallace Stevens, edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson.
Library of America, 1032 pp., $35, October 1997, 1 883011 45 0Show More
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“... among his own poems was, Wallace Stevens said he liked best ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’, from Harmonium (1923). The work ‘wears a deliberately commonplace costume’, Stevens said, ‘and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry’. He didn’t remember much about writing the poem except ‘the state of mind from which ...”

Inky Pilgrimage

Mark Ford, 24 May 2007

The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie 
edited by Donald Blount.
South Carolina, 430 pp., £30.95, January 2006, 1 57003 248 3Show More
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“... if the verses were very bad.’ Although certain lines and images from both are carried over into Harmonium, neither sequence suggests that their author, who was then about thirty, was likely to metamorphose into one of the major poets of the 20th century. It seems to have taken the disappointment of the marriage itself, which he had fondly imagined as likely ...”

Lord Fitzcricket

P.N. Furbank: The composer’s life, 21 May 1998

Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric 
by Mark Amory.
Chatto, 274 pp., £20, March 1998, 1 85619 234 2Show More
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“... further than he suggests. There was, for instance, the rich tissue of legends about the spinet, harmonium or grand piano incorporated into his automobile. ‘Lord Berners was a musician whose motor car then [1918] or shortly afterwards was outfitted with a small harmonium,’ writes Miriam Benkovitz in her Ronald Firbank ...”

Snap among the Witherlings

Michael Hofmann: Wallace Stevens, 22 September 2016

The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens 
by Paul Mariani.
Simon and Schuster, 512 pp., £23, May 2016, 978 1 4516 2437 3Show More
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“... bad biographies that tell you nothing about their subject’s breakfast preferences, and The Whole Harmonium is one such. Stevens is one of those apparently fortunate, self-standing poets who are not greatly involved with the styles or personalities of their time, whose work sets no puzzles and makes a sufficiently vivid impression all by itself. It’s hard ...”

Playing the Seraphine

Frank Kermode: Penelope Fitzgerald, 25 January 2001

The Means of Escape: Stories 
by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Flamingo, 117 pp., £12.99, October 2000, 0 00 710030 2Show More
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“... an ‘instrument of the reed kind’ invented by a Mr John Green in 1833. It is, or was, a kind of harmonium, sometimes called an American organ and, according to the Dictionary, common in ‘Boer houses of the better class’. In Tasmanian houses, too, one is willing to bet. Indeed Fitzgerald, defying the lexicographers, says the instrument was invented by a ...”
From The Blog

Thankful Villages

Alice Spawls, 10 June 2016

“... capture his first impressions of a place. Culpho is invoked in a strange hypnotic instrumental on harmonium and baritone ukulele; the long melodic phrases descend before switching up, questioningly, at the end. Maybe the village doesn't want him to be there? 'Stoke Hammond' is built around a simple scale which repeats lightly over and over again, inspired by ...”

Falling Stars

Alan Coren, 5 November 1981

Richard Burton 
by Paul Ferris.
Weidenfeld, 212 pp., £7.95, September 1981, 0 297 77966 4Show More
Peter Sellers 
by Alexander Walker.
Weidenfeld, 240 pp., £7.95, September 1981, 0 297 77965 6Show More
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“... ladies gladly cough up the wherewithal for a memento mori to carry home and stick under a short harmonium leg. Many of them, of course, will read it, which may also explain why the Sellers type face is larger: the text may be read through tears, undistorted. I know this, because I have tried it, and the fact that my own tears sprang from other sources than ...”

On Douglas Crase

Matthew Bevis, 5 December 2019

“... of utterance and identity that must have come with the first books of Wallace Stevens (Harmonium) and Elizabeth Bishop (North and South).’ The book they were talking about was Douglas Crase’s The Revisionist. Out of print for almost forty years, it has now been reissued (Carcanet, £12.99) in a volume that also includes Crase’s only other ...”

Stuffing

Gabriele Annan, 3 September 1987

The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle 
by Paul Delany.
Macmillan, 270 pp., £14.95, August 1987, 0 333 44572 4Show More
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“... teach the whole damn World that there’s a better Heaven than the pale serene Anglican windless harmonium-buzzing Eternity of the Christians, a Heaven in Time, now and forever, ending for each, staying for all, a Heaven of Laughter and Bodies and Flowers and Love and People and Sun and Wind, in the only place we know and care for, ON EARTH.’ It’s a ...”

All the girls said so

August Kleinzahler: John Berryman, 2 July 2015

The Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 427 pp., £11.99, October 2014, 978 0 374 53455 4Show More
77 Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 84 pp., £10, October 2014, 978 0 374 53452 3Show More
Berryman’s Sonnets 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 127 pp., £10, October 2014, 978 0 374 53454 7Show More
The Heart Is Strange 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 179 pp., £17.50, October 2014, 978 0 374 22108 9Show More
Poets in their Youth 
by Eileen Simpson.
Farrar, Straus, 274 pp., £11.50, October 2014, 978 0 374 23559 8Show More
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“... poetry” was in the past; its works, which we desperately admired, The Waste Land, Lustra, Harmonium, Spring and All, and so many others, had been written long ago and had exhausted the poetic impulse. Nothing was left for us to do.’ The Chicago poet and editor Paul Carroll, born in 1926, wrote: To a young poet the scene in American verse in the late ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1989, 11 January 1990

“... straw hat like an upturned plant pot who eats toffees throughout; and another lady who plays the harmonium in tan slacks and a tea-cosy wig. The server, a middle-aged man with white hair, doesn’t wear a surplice, just ordinary clothes with an open-necked shirt, and but for knowing all the sacred drill, might have been roped in from the group on the corner ...”

Cardigan Arrest

Robert Potts: Poetry in Punglish, 21 June 2007

Look We Have Coming to Dover! 
by Daljit Nagra.
Faber, 55 pp., £8.99, February 2007, 978 0 571 23122 5Show More
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“... my lap I deadened my head inside the turban from holy muzak           of moaning harmonium (and buk-buk-buk           that bored me rigid), still feeling sick           when my deaf grandad started to let rip           in fake posh-Indian: Who says today’s children don’t eat the old food? The quirky ...”

Ineffectuals

Peter Campbell, 19 April 1990

The World of Nagaraj 
by R.K. Narayan.
Heinemann, 186 pp., £12.95, March 1990, 0 434 49617 0Show More
The Great World 
by David Malouf.
Chatto, 330 pp., £12.95, April 1990, 0 7011 3415 1Show More
The Shoe 
by Gordon Legge.
Polygon, 181 pp., £7.95, December 1989, 0 7486 6080 1Show More
Trying to grow 
by Firdaus Kanga.
Bloomsbury, 242 pp., £13.95, February 1990, 0 7475 0549 7Show More
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“... Street, and from it emerge his wife’s versions of film songs, accompanied by herself on the harmonium. Sita is rather glad of the liveliness. Nagaraj searches out lamp wicks to block his ears, for he has now identified his mission: a life of the sage Naranda. His excitement while buying the best possible notebooks and at seeing them filled with ...”

Migne and Moody

Graham Robb, 4 August 1994

God’s Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbé Migne 
by R. Howard Bloch.
Chicago, 162 pp., £19.95, June 1994, 0 226 05970 7Show More
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“... building. The Ateliers also contained a library, a bookshop, a bindery, a chapel, an organ and harmonium factory, Migne’s own apartment and an artist’s studio, misleadingly termed a ‘museum’. The museum sold ‘at the lowest possible price’ paintings, statues, altarpieces, Stations of the Cross and other religious paraphernalia. There was some ...”

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