Tags: Poem.
The Virgin Carrying a Lantern is a poem from Wallace Stevens’s first book of poetry Harmonium (1923). It was one of the few Harmonium poems first published in that volume so it is still under copyright. However it is quoted here as justified by fair use to facilitate scholarly commentary.This poem illustrates Edmund Wilson’s maxim about reading Stevens that even when you do not know what he is saying you know that he is saying it well.