The peculiar "obstetrics" to which the manuscript of the poem was subjected has often been discussed. It is generally agreed that Pound’s cuts transformed a chaotic mass of poetry into a precise, aggressively modern masterpiece. Koestenbaum contends that the poem was "feminine" in its original form but transformed radically by Pound s assertive masculinity. We might indeed he tempted to see in this productive coediting of a great poem the shift away from a bisexuality that left open many potentialities to masculine values mistakenly identified with the essence of high modernism.

The Waste Land is a much more complex case--in part because the poem that Eliot wrote and the poem that was published differ considerably. The Waste Land would have openly established popular culture as a major intertext of modernist poetry if Pound had not edited out most of Eliot’s popular references. Though Pound, like Eliot, assailed the "very pernicious current idea that a good book must be of necessity a dull one," he did not consider contemporary popular culture seriously as a potential antidote to literary dullness.

Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on October 2, 1879, and died at the age of seventy-six in Hartford, Connecticut on August 2, 1955. He attended Harvard as a special student from 1897 to 1900 but did not graduate; he graduated from New York law school in 1903 and was admitted to the New York bar in 1904, the year he met Elsie Kachel, a young woman from Reading, whom he married in 1909. They had one daughter, Holly Bight, born in 1924, conceived on a leisurely ocean voyage California via the Panama Canal that they took to celebrate the publication of his first book.

I first met Mr. Stevens in Philadelphia in 1928. We had a contractor who we were bonding to the Board of Education, guaranteeing the performance of his contract. The fellow went broke, and we had to contact the home office [of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity’s Insurance Department in New York] to let them know we were in trouble with this man. Mr. Stevens got on the phone and told the manager that it was important enough that he felt he ought to come down to Philadelphia. …

"I didn’t know him as anything but a lawyer and a business executive [in 1931, when Taylor, an experienced surety lawyer, began working in the Hartford Accident and Indemnity’s Insurance Department in New York] …

"… He said he enjoyed Havana very much, but the thing he enjoyed most was the climate, nature, the sky, the natural aspect. Not the city, the tropics. And the air. He said he thought the air in Cuba had something very special about it. And I said, "Are you saying about the air something similar to what is said in The Tempest? It’s a wonderful description of the air in the Bahamas. There’s something soft and sweet about the air." He said, "Yes, and how funny that you should talk about The Tempest," because obviously he was remembering that, too.

"The next morning we were at breakfast at the Yale Club. Randall was across the table, and I was somehow next to Stevens, We were talking generally, and I said something about seeing Ninotchka in New York with Randall. Stevens came alive immediately. "Garbo!" he said. He talked about always wishing he could meet her and how beautiful she was, that she really was his favorite actress in the world. There was a pause.

"This final movement of the poem, in contrast to the stasis of its beginning, is bridged by a passage at the very middle of the poem:

    nor cloudy palm

Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured

As April’s green endured; or will endure

Like her remembrance of wakened birds,

Or her desire for June and evening, tipped

By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

Stevens's search for a rhetoric more than fiction and a nature less than an external fate begins with "Sunday Morning" and its realignment of the Emersonian and romantic dualities. The poem mourns at once the loss of Christian and romantic mythologies, which offer versions of the same fusion of temporal and eternal realities. "Sunday Morning" does not judge religion to be a fiction and Christ to be but a man in order to exhort us to a species of nature worship. For Stevens portrays the world of sense impressions as a fantastic play of surfaces.

Harmonium offered readers a very different version of "Sunday Morning" from the one they had seen in Poetry in 1915. In Poetry, the fifth and final stanza, now recognized as the seventh stanza, had expressed the exalted paganism of "a ring of men" chanting "Their boisterous devotion to the sun." This ecstasy of human physical feeling, the only divinity of humankind, would then be recreated and sustained by echo throughout the environment. In Harmonium, however, this ringing affirmation of human and natural coexistence was no longer the poem's final emphasis.