Man Whose Pharynx was Bad

Stevens’s first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923), was published when the poet was forty-four years old. In 1931, the publisher, Knopf, reissued the book. Three poems were omitted and fourteen added. The first of these additional poems was “The Man Whose Pharynx was Bad.”
The pharynx is part of both the respiratory and digestive systems. In humans, the pharynx plays an important role in vocalization. Its function is to filter, warm, and moisten air before conducting it to the lungs. 
An individual with an infected or irritated pharynx is often diagnosed with acutepharyngitis. (Aka, a sore throat.)
==An Unusual Cure for Writer's Block==
The gist of the poem is a man grown indifferent to the time of the year; summer and winter, the respective solstices, seem tragically identical. They can stir “no poet in his sleep,” implying that the creative impulse has suffered under the “malady of the quotidian.” In this respect, “Pharynx” might be an intriguing companion to “The Comedian as the Letter C,” another poem about stunted creativity. 
Robert Buttel, improbably, sees this poem as about the emptiness of city life. Milton J. Bates is probably right, however, when he says that boredom and ennui are temperamentally uncongenial to Stevens.
The key to the poem might be understanding precisely how a bad pharynx (i.e., a sore throat) might harm a poet. Traditionally, poets have often been called “singers.” After all, Homer had sung the anger of Achilles. A singer with a sore throat, however, is hardly any singer at all. The poem tells us that the “malady of the quotidian” and an indifference to the seasons has prevented sleeping poets from awakening or singing their songs. Thus the quotidian is to poets as sore throats are to singers.
The final half of the poem, however, suggests some measure of hope. If the “winter once could penetrate / Through all its purples to the final slate,” then might “new orations of the cold” be sprouted—orations, of course, being an activity highly dependent on the voice. In other words, the penetrating winter might be the best medicine for writer’s block.