Stevens’ titles are wonders in themselves. Here are a few of the most maddening, funny and bizarre.

The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage

Le Monocle de Mon Oncle – French for “the monocle of my uncle.”

The Comedian as the Letter C

Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon – Palaz from the Italian palazzo, a large residence, a palace. From Eleanor Cook’s The Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens: “Steven’s tongue-in-cheek response in 1955 identified Hoon as Hoon or just possibly “the son of old man Hoon,” who sounds like a Dutchman. He added that the name Hoon was probably a “cipher for the ‘loneliest air’ (third line of the poem) of sky and space.”

The Emperor of Ice Cream

Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs.

Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion

The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad – Pharynx: the section of the alimentary canal that extends from the mouth and nasal cavities to the larynx, where it becomes continuous with the esophagus.

The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade

Mozart, 1935

Nudity at the Capital

Nudity in the Colonies

Mud Master

A Fish-Scale Sunrise

The Man on the Dump

United Dames of America

Mrs. Alfred Uruguay

Asides on the Oboe

Gigantomachia – Cook: “a contest resembling the war of the giants or Titans against the gods or Olympians”

No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch

Esthétique du Mal – Baudelaire – Les Fleurs du Mal

Wild Ducks, People and Distances

Description Without Place

Late Hymn from the Myrrh-Mountain

A Completely New Set of Objects

Adult Epigram

Thinking of a Relation between the Images of Metaphors

Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion

The Dove in the Belly

A Lot of People Bathing in a Steam

Large Red Man Reading

In the Element of Antagonisms

Saint John and the Back-Ache

Puella Parvula – Cook: “(Latin) a very small girl, either a child or a young woman (Catullus calls his lover puella)”

Lebensweisheitspielerei – Cook “(Ger.) “Practical Wisdoms’ Amusement,” compound apparently invented by Stevens; Lebensweisheit is common, as is Spielerei, but not the combination.”

The Poem that Took the Place of the Mountain

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

The River of Rivers in Connecticut

Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself

Someone Puts a Pineapple Together

The Desire to Make Love in a Pagoda

Nuns Painting Water-Lilies

The Role of the Idea in Poetry

Farewell without a Guitar