"The Surprises of the Superhuman" is a poem from

Wallace Stevens Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance compa ...

's first book of poetry, ''

Harmonium The pump organ is a type of free-reed organ that generates sound as air flows past a vibrating piece of thin metal in a frame. The piece of metal is called a reed. Specific types of pump organ include the reed organ, harmonium, and melodeon. T ...

.'' It was first published in 1918, so it is in the public domain. This poem was Section V of the poem-sequence "Lettres d'un Soldat" (1918). It was extracted as "The Surprises of the Superhuman" for the second edition of ''Harmonium'', along with "

Negation In logic, negation, also called the logical complement, is an operation that takes a proposition P to another proposition "not P", written \neg P, \mathord P or \overline. It is interpreted intuitively as being true when P is false, and false ...

"; the two poems adjoin each other near the end of the book. Both poems reflect Stevens's reading of

Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, Prose poetry, prose poet, cultural critic, Philology, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philo ...

. Bates comments that it contrasts the bourgeois concept of justice with that suitable to "Űbermenschlichkeit".Bates, p. 251

Notes

References

* Bates, Milton J. A Mythology of Self. 1985: University of California Press. 1918 poems American poems Poetry by Wallace Stevens {{poem-stub