"The Weeping Burgher" is a poem from 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 originally published in 1919, so it is in the public domain.

The Weeping Burgher  It is with a strange malice  That I distort the world.  Ah! that ill humors  Should mask as white girls.  And ah! that Scaramouche  Should have a black barouche.  The sorry verities!  Yet in excess, continual,  There is cure of sorrow.  Permit that if as ghost I come  Among the people burning in me still,  I come as belle design  Of foppish line.  And I, then, tortured for old speech,  A white of wildly woven rings;  I, weeping in a calcined heart,   My hands such sharp, imagined things.

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 makes himself present to
the reader as a ghost of himself, but an appealingly foppish ghost of
"belle design", quite different from the weeping burgher who crafted
the artifice. The poem immediately follows "The place of the
solitaires

The Place of the Solitaires

"The Place of the Solitaires" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in the journal Poetry in October, 1919, so it is in the public domain....

", with which it may be instructively compared. The hands
that do the writing are now seen as "sharp, imagined things"
responsible for strangely malicious distortions.

Bates recounts the following anecdote.

Two years after "The Weeping Burgher" appeared in [the journal] Poetry, Genevieve
Taggard told Stevens of the rumor that his poems were "hideous ghosts"
of himself, to which he replied, "It may be."

See Marianne Moore's comment

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...

about the "shadow of acrimonious, unprovoked contumely" that she detected in Harmonium.