The Emperor of Ice-Cream
"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is a celebrated poem from Wallace Stevens' first collection of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1922, and is in the public domain. The poem "wears a deliberately commonplace costume," he wrote in a letter, "and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it."
In popular culture
- Composer Roger Reynolds wrote an avant garde, mixed-media dramatization of the poem for 8 vocal soloists, piano, percussion, and double bass in 1961–62.
- In 1985, Composer Gary Kulesha published a revision of his clarinet quartet named after the poem.
- "Misha Chellam of the acoustic pop group Speechwriters LLC wrote a song entitled "The Emperor of Ice Cream" while in his high school folk-pop group "Sid and Me".
- Ken Nordine, beat poet and innovator of a stylistic form known as "word jazz," recorded a rendition of Stevens's poem to the backing of eerily bubbly circus music on his 1994 album "Upper Limbo."
- Alternative rock group They Might Be Giants used the phrase "finale of seem" in their 1988 song, Pencil Rain.
- Stephen King made several allusions to this poem in his novels Salem's Lot and Insomnia and his collection of short stories Just After Sunset in the short story "Harvey's Dream", as well as his television miniseries, Kingdom Hospital.
- The poem was quoted in the film Pathology.
- Dean Koontz referenced this poem in his book The Good Guy.
- A soap made by the cosmetics company Lush is named 'The Emperor of Icecream' after this poem.
- The song The King of Cream by The Love Kills Theory is an homage to this poem.
- The Emperor of Ice-Cream (1975) by Brian Moore is a coming-of-age novel set in Belfast.
- An Irish band called itself Emperor of Ice Cream, and released 2 EPs "Puerile" and "Skin Tight" in 1993.
- The hero of Tom Perotta's Joe College reflects on the poem throughout the novel, wondering what the ice cream symbolizes.
- The heroine of Laura Mcneal's National Book Award-nominated novel Dark Water reads the poem for a high school class and wonders about its meaning.
- Spenser, the hero of Robert B. Parker's novel School Days quotes from the poem.
- Author Alan Moore was a member in a band named "Emperors of Ice Cream" which recorded two songs "March of the Sinister Ducks" and "Old Gangsters Never Die".
- Anthony Cappella published a novel "The Empress of Ice-Cream" in 2010.
- The protagonist of Andrew Smith's novel Grasshopper Jungle frequently cites "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" as his favorite poem.
- See Buttel, p. 20. See also the LibriVox site on the complete public domain poems of Wallace Stevens.
- Stevens, Wallace. Letter to William Rose Benét. 6 January 1933.
- Allen, Austin. "Wallace Stevens: “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”: The chilly heart of a whimsical poem". Resources. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 16 November 2014.
- "Sid and Me – Misc – SWLLC Digital Archive – Speechwriters LLC Free MP3s". Fexum.com. Retrieved 2012-08-07.
- "Lyrics:Pencil Rain – TMBW: The They Might Be Giants Knowledge Base". TMBW. Retrieved 2012-08-07.
- Morse, Samuel French. "Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate – Harold Bloom's Vast Accumulation". The Wallace Stevens Journal. Volume 1, Numbers 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 1977)
- Stevens, Wallace. The Explicator. Vol VII (November 1948), unpaged.
- Vendler, Helen. Words Chosen Out of Desire. 1984: University of Tennessee Press.
- The Emperor of Ice Cream: Analysis and Study Guide
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- Explanations of the meaning of this poem by Helen Vendler and others