The two years following Ideas of Order formed a period of intense experimentation for Stevens. Although he would omit ‘Owl's Clover’ from the 1954 Collected Poems, his attempt at a quasi-allegory concerning the function of art in the Depression marked a greater engagement with ‘reality’ than Ideas had achieved (despite poems such as ‘Mozart, 1935’). The jacket statement to the trade edition of Ideas defensively asserted: ‘The book is essentially a book of pure poetry.’ Whilst Stevens acknowledged ‘economic […] political and social changes’, he apparently sought a modernized ‘pure poetry’ rather than abandoning one kind of verse for a socially more responsive but poetically less sophisticated idiom. As we have seen, however, Ideas of Order was anything but ‘pure poetry’ in the sense of verse aspiring to the condition of music, of sounds miraculously free from the significant world. Harmonium too thrived on a tension between Symbolist experiment (‘To the One of Fictive Music’), poems that revel in sonority (‘Bantams in Pine-Woods’) and more ‘theoretical’ explorations of self and world (‘A High-Toned Old Christian Woman’, ‘Theory’, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, ‘The Snow Man’ and so on).