In a letter written in 1933 Stevens selects "The Emperor of Ice Cream" as his favorite among his poems because it contains something of "the essential gaudiness of poetry". (Later, in 1939, he wrote a letter expressing fondness for "Fabliau of Florida".) The gaudiness of color images is striking in such poems as "Domination of Black" and "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" which also associate Stevens with the imagist movement in early twentieth-century art. There may be a link between the gaudiness of poetry and the title of the book. His original choice was "The Grand Poem: Preliminary Minutiae" but he may have chosen the title "Harmonium" for its eponymous relation to a harmonium—that is, a gaudy little organ-like calliope, suggesting Calliope, muse of poetry. Note also the "Adagia" thesis that words are "the only melodeon".