Harmonium by Stevens, Wallace - 1931

New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1931. Second edition, with 14 new poems and the fourth state of binding. 151 pp. 1 vols. 8vo. Cloth and boards. Fine in slightly chipped unclipped dust jacket. Russet morocco backed slipcase and chemise. Second edition, with 14 new poems and the fourth state of binding. 151 pp. 1 vols. 8vo. INSCRIBED. Presentation inscription by Stevens to Filipino-American artist Alfonso Ossario: "To the Painter from the Poet," below which is Ossario's own inscription "Gift of Dunstan Thompson / Cambridge Mass. '34" and with the artist's monogram below. Also with Ossario's stylized and enlarged monogram in red and black ink on the half-title, dated 1972.

Alfonso Ossario (1916-1990) was an abstract-expressionist painter who worked with Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet, and showed in the landmark Art of the Assemblage show at MoMA in 1961. He was born in the Philippines but moved to the United States at the age of 14, and attended Harvard, where he received this book as a gift from Thompson. Dunstan Thompson (1918-1975) was an American poet best known for work that treated his experience in World War II and as an openly gay man. Jorge Luis Borges translated some of his work into Spanish.

Stevens regularly engaged with avant-garde visual art in his work. His first book, Harmonium, reflects his interest in first generation New York Dada, The Man with the Blue Guitar and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction form a dialectic of concerns around Surrealism and Abstraction, while his later poetry like The Auroras of Autumn is written in parallel with Abstract-Expressionism, of which Ossario was also a protagonist. Edelstein A1.b; Connolly 100, 46 (for the 1923 edition)