sentences:  According to a reading that naively equates the poem's speaker with the poet, Stevens confesses to a strange malice that distorts the world as given
  by the poems in "Harmonium", masking ill humors and poses.The masks are excesses that are his poetic cure for sorrow.The poet presents himself to the reader as a ghost but an appealingly foppish ghost of "belle design", quite different from the weeping burgher who crafted the artifice.