Slow acceptance, late fame

Wallace Stevens' first book sold fewer than 100 copies. I imagine it must be a collector's item today.

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com Wallace Stevens & his Blue Guitar On this day in 1937, Wallace Stevens published his fourth book of poetry, The Man with the Blue Guitar. Stevens was a lawyer with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company for almost forty years, and he was forty-four when he published his first book of poetry. This was Harmonium, a collection which included some of his most anthologized poems -- "Domination of Black," "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" -- but which sold fewer than 100 copies at the time. It was dismissed by its New York Times reviewer as a "glittering edifice of icicles" within which "there is not an idea that can vitally affect the mind, there is not a word that can arouse emotion." But by 1955, the year before his death, Stevens's Collected Poems had won the Pulitzer and National Book Awards and he had come to be seen as a founding father of modern poetry