"The Public Square" is a poem from the second
edition (1931) of
Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens 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 a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

's first book of poetry,
Harmonium

Harmonium (poetry collection)

Harmonium is a book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens. His first book, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. He was in middle age at that time, forty-four years old. The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred...

. It was first
published in 1923, so it is one of
the few poems in the collection that is not free of copyright, but it
is quoted here in full as justified by fair use

Fair use

Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders...

 for scholarly
commentary.

The Public Square  A slash of angular blacks  Like a fractured edifice  That was buttressed by blue slats  In a coma of the moon.  A slash and the edifice fell,  Pylon and pier fell down.  A mountain-blue cloud arose  Like a thing in which they fell,  Fell slowly as when at night  A languid janitor bears  His lantern through colonnades  And the architecture swoons.  It turned cold and silent. Then  The square began to clear.  The bijou of Atlas, the moon,  Was last with its porcelain leer.

The violence of an edifice's demolition is matched by the violence of
the poem's language, particularly in the first two stanzas. The
slow-motion collapse is captured in the surreal atmosphere created by
the third stanza. The final stanza etches a precise image of the
square's clearing.

The harshness of the poem can be compared to the brutal encounter with
Berserk in "Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks

Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks

"Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium . It was one of the few Harmonium poems first published in that volume, so it is still under copyright...

", with which it shares
an architectural

Architecture

Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...

 motif.

Buttel detects the influence of Cubism

Cubism

Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...

.