“The Plot Against the Giant” appeared in Wallace Stevens’s first book of poetry, Harmonium (Alfred A. Knopf, 1923). In her essay “Sound and Sensuous Awakening in Harmonium,” which appeared in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 2009), a publication of The Wallace Stevens Society, Beverly Maeder, a scholar of Wallace Stevens and a former professor of American literature at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, wrote, “Although the poem’s sound patterns rely relatively little on assonance and consonance of the kind we have been observing here, the scenario nonetheless culminates, with some panache, in asserting the sensuous power of the human voice. In this three-part tale, the First, Second, and Third Girls detail the means they will use to overcome the giant. [...] The primacy of the sonic over the visual may be inferred if we consider that the ‘plot’ ends with the winner (as does Marie Borroff, who links the ‘Third Girl’ with the third-comer of fairy tales and reminds us that ‘the third pays for all.’” She continues, “[W]e may imagine that the project of the ‘Third Girl’ is analogous to the poet’s project for affecting the reader, so that in what follows, we can read He as ‘the reader’ and I as ‘the poet[.]’”