Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Wallace Stevens, an American modernist poet who lived from 1879 to 1955.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collected poems in 1955.

I've read a couple of his poems on the podcast before,

including one of his most famous poems, the idea of order at Key West. As I mentioned before,

he was actually a lifelong employee for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He was an executive. He was educated at Harvard and New York, and spent much of his life writing while also in business.

The poem that I'm going to read today is called The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm. It goes like this.

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book.

And summer night was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

except that the reader leaned above the page,

wanted to lean, wanted

much most to be, the scholar to whom his book is true, to whom the summer night is like a perfection

of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning, part

of the mind, the access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm.

The truth in a calm world in which there is no other meaning itself is calm.

Itself is summer and night.

Itself is the reader, leaning late and reading there.

In his book, How to Read a Poem, Edward Hirsch had some thoughts on this particular poem,

and I'll go ahead and share them with you because he could say things much better than I could.

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