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The Idea of Order at Key West | Introduction

Written in 1934, “The Idea of Order at Key West” remains one of the most difficult poems by one of America’s most difficult poets. Yet, it stands as one of Stevens’ most anthologized poems, and according to most critics of his work, it is one of his best. Stevens must have liked it as well, as he made it the title poem in his 1936 collection, Ideas of Order. As widely praised as the poem is, no authoritative reading has emerged. Indeed, there are as many different interpretations of the poem as there are readers of it.

One of the great ironies of “The Idea of Order at Key West,” is that for a complex poem, its plot is rather simple. An unnamed speaker is walking along the beach of Key West and hears a woman singing a song. The song enchants the listener/speaker, and as the woman is singing, he begins to muse on the beauty of her song and its relationship to his own life, particularly his ideas on reality and imagination. Finally, after listening and thinking, the speaker experiences a kind of epiphany, a moment of insight. While few would question these basic facts of the poem, the debate takes place around what Stevens thinks of the song and what kind of epiphany he experiences.

While the poem remains too complex to be easily explicated or paraphrased here, it is accurate to say that the poem dramatizes important conflicts for Stevens: imagination and reality, presence and absence, order and chaos, nature and civilization, the mind and the body. While readers never see the female singer or actually hear what it is the woman is singing, they experience what the speaker of the poem experiences: transformation. The woman’s song transforms the speaker’s experience of walking along the beach, and, what’s more, when he returns to town, he discovers that his perception of Key West has also been altered. Early critics cite the poem as an example of Stevens championing the creative process, but that is inaccurate, according to most recent criticism. These critics believe that the poem is about the need for poetry and the need for art. Thus, the emphasis of the poem is not so much on the song itself but what the song does to the listener. One can extend that, of course, to Stevens’ hope for his own poetry—that it has the same effect on his readers as the song does on the speaker of the poem.

The Idea of Order at Key West Summary

Lines 1–7
The opening stanza of the poem, along with the title, help set the stage for the action that transpires in the poem itself. Right away, Stevens distinguishes between the mind and external reality and also the singer and the sea, but as is always the case for Stevens, these divisions are never hard and fast. Readers do know a few things, though. There is a singer, who is a female. There is a speaker and also a companion, probably Ramon Fernandez of stanza six. They are all walking along the sea. Of all these agents, the agent receiving the primary attention is the female singer. The poem opens with a rather remarkable claim that she sings “beyond the genius of the sea.” But Stevens describes the sea as a “wholly body” that both makes “a constant cry” and causes a constant cry. The syntax of this stanza is confusing because so many phrases may modify each other. The result of this lack of distinction is a sense of merging, a theme Stevens will develop throughout the poem. It’s difficult to tell what belongs to what. What does emerge, though, is a sense that the cry takes on an inhuman significance, that it becomes an inspiring or even spiritual force that unites sea, land, speaker, and singer. The speaker of the poem may not comprehend exactly what’s going on, but some sort of larger, spiritual understanding of the whole of experience is taking place.

Lines 8–14
Stevens is quick to point out in the second stanza that the sea “was not a mask,” which is to say that the sea is not a static, external reality, just as the speaker is not a static, false, object. Both are in flux. They are not facades but wholly pulsing bodies. Stevens goes on to say in line ten that the cry of the sea is what the woman hears and translates into her own song. This cry, uttered by the sea, resembles the cry the young Walt Whitman experiences in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” in that the cry of the ocean becomes the song of the poet or in this case the song of the singer. In this moment, the inhuman song of the sea fuses with the utterly human song of the woman. By uttering the song “word by word,” she makes the inhuman human. What’s more, the poet suggests that the woman’s beautiful words actually stir the waters and the wind. However, even if this is the case, the poet reminds readers that his attention has been transferred from the sea to the woman, for it is “she and not the sea” that he hears. This is an important move for Stevens because he seems to embrace a decidedly human gesture over a gesture of nature. While this may seem a simple act, it reverses the trend of romanticism to embrace nature over people. Stevens implicit message here is that poetry remains an utterly human endeavor.

Lines 15–20
In this stanza, Stevens establishes the primacy of the individual by asserting that even though she may have gotten the idea or the source of her song from the sea, the song ultimately issues from her alone. It is her song, just as the poem is Stevens’ poem. He will soften his stance on the individuality of poetic creation over the course of his career, but in his early poems, Stevens is profoundly interested in the power of the imagination. Thus, where in stanzas one and two the singer and the sea seemed a joined pair, by stanza three, the sea is merely a backdrop for her song. But even after all of this has been cleared up, a nagging question remains: “Whose spirit is this?” Is it hers? Is it the sea’s? Is it the spirit of the poet observing these forces? The moment is so strong that the poet and his companion know that they must keep asking themselves, whose spirit is driving this glorious song? Stevens seems to suggest that to answer this question is to get a glimpse into the mysteries of the hazy borders between imagination and reality. In a later poem, Stevens claims that the search for reality is as important as the search for God; perhaps he is implying here that if he can discern whose spirit is animating the woman and the sea, he can begin to know not only the mysteries of human imagination and perception but also the mysteries of God... » Complete The Idea of Order at Key West Summary