This comprehensive study of the ideas of music in Wallace Stevens' poetry 'rereads' Stevens as a poet whose compositional strategies assimilate musical forms and performative programs. The 'decomposer' is the poet of qualification, who constantly explores the validity of 'developing variation' as the best means for creating art not limited by system or medium. As both subject and strategy for poetry, music becomes Stevens' most frequently used figure connecting his art to the rhythms of modern life. Thus, to disregard Stevens' ideas of music is to misread the text.