Tags: Poem.
The Public Square is a poem from the secondedition (1931) of Wallace Stevens’s first book of poetryHarmonium. It was firstpublished in 1923 so it is one ofthe few poems in the collection that is not free of copyright but itis quoted here in full as justified by fair use for scholarlycommentary.The violence of an edifice’s demolition is matched by the violence ofthe poem’s language particularly in the first two stanzas.