"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is a celebrated poem from Wallace Stevens's first collection of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1922, and is in the public domain. The poem "wears a deliberately commonplace costume," he wrote in a letter, "and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it."
According to the critic Helen Vendler, quoted by Austin Allen, the ice-cream in the poem is being prepared for serving at a funeral wake.
In popular culture
References
The Emperor of Ice-Cream Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA