Tags: Poem.
The Surprises of the Superhuman is a poem from Wallace Stevens’s first bookof poetry Harmonium. Itwas first published in 1918 so it is in the publicdomain.This poem was Section V of the poem-sequence Lettres d’un Soldat(1918). It was extracted as The Surprises of the Superhuman for thesecond edition of Harmonium along with Negation; the two poemsadjoin each other near the end of the book. Both poems reflectStevens’s reading of Nietzsche.