Ideas of
Order by Wallace Stevens
IDEAS OF ORDER (1935), Stevens’s long-delayed second volume of verse, shifts from the flamboyant poems and elliptical anecdotes in HARMONIUM toward a meditative blank verse on the genesis of poetry, a theme he pursues throughout the rest of his canon. The title
poem, The Idea of Order at Key West personifies the theme in a girl singing alone by the sea whose voice, as in endowed by some Orphic power, transforms sound of the wind and sea into her own voice as the sole maker of the poem and
poetic translator of
reality. She is the artificer of her own
world, as poetry is the artificer of the world it imaginatively apprehends.
The awed speaker of the poem, with a speechless sidekick in tow, wonders at the phenomenology of perception and the imposition of order the song seems to impose on natural elements, as a counter-pressure against crashing seaside reality. She symbolizes the maker’s (i.e., poet’s) rage to create order from the sea, a universal symbol of life’s overwhelming power. The central question remains: whose idea of order reigns among the plunging of the waves at Key West? Is the singing girl a poet prop? Is she a version of a classical Muse or an Orphic singer whose lyrics can rearrange the physical world? The answer, found in this poem and in other poems by Stevens, is that she is a
spirit, but not a supernatural spirit. Her seeming sway over the elements represents the human spirit rising in the voice of poetry. The Idea of Order at Key West is one of the foundations upon which Stevens builds his poetic of the supreme fiction, the almost alchemical interaction of imagination and reality.
Other poems in this volume deal with personal aspects of poetic order. A Farewell to Florida bids goodbye to the
poet’s strenuous search for an inspiring feminine archetype in the tropical lushness, an earth mother figure as nubile maiden. The change of perspective from Stevens’s Florida poems to the epiphany at Key West changes the compass of his poetic explorations. Ànglais Mort a Florence presents a moribund Englishman (the poet) striving to recover his spirit and reclaim his vehemence, mistakenly assuming the exterior world offers the only source of strength.
A Postcard from the Volcano reflects on the differing perspectives toward poetry and its enduring warrant between generations. The central symbol is a mansion, whose long-gone occupant rumbled though its hallways, leaving a poetic legacy to the playful, uncomprehending children who will eventually incorporate their vision of reality in their own speech. The mansion seems blank to them because the meanings the poet attributed to it with his sensibility and style are dislocated by time. The postcard (poem) addresses the new generation’s inevitable struggle to reconcile the inner self and outer world through the imagination, the pervasive theme of Stevens’s next volume, THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR.
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