Contents: IntroductionPoem Summary Themes Style Critical Overview Sources For Further Study |
Criticism
What Do I Read Next?
- Stevens’ The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, reissued in 1990, is a book that contains the poems “Idea of Order at Key West” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” It also includes the play Bowl, Cat and Broomstick and a prose statement on the poetry of war.
- The poet most often compared to Stevens is the great American poet William Carlos Williams, who was Stevens’ longtime friend. Like Stevens, Williams held an interest in art and poetic form. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams (1986) is a compilation of most of his published poetry.
- Secretaries of the Moon: The Letters of Wallace Stevens and Jose Rodriguez Feo (1986) collects the letters between Stevens and the talented Cuban poet with whom Stevens maintained close correspondence.
- Peter Brazeau gathers stories and other anecdotes from Stevens’ friends and coworkers in Parts of a World, Wallace Stevens Remembered: An Oral Biography (1983).
- Another poet commonly linked to Stevens is Ezra Pound. His Selected Poems (1959) is a good introduction to his work.
- Stevens was very interested in painting and art theory. The Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell tries to do in art what Stevens tries to do in poetry. Robert Motherwell (1983), edited by H. H. Arnason and Barbaralee Diamonstein, includes both illustrations of and essays about his work.
- Another very good book on Stevens is Margaret Dickie’s Lyric Contingencies: Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens (1991). In her study of the two poets, she shows how Dickinson and Stevens, both private people, write poetry that desires and intends a connection with their audience.
- Albert Gelpi’s comprehensive study of modern American poetry, A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910 – 1950, published in 1987, offers readings of Stevens, Crane, Williams, Pound, T. S. Eliot, and other important American poets.
would make up Ideas of Order, he seems to grow somewhat skeptical of poetry’s ability to embody or fully represent desire.
In “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” a poem from Harmonium, Stevens writes that music means “desiring you,” but in a different poem fourteen years later, he writes that “the waltz / Is no longer a mode of desire.” Given the fact that Stevens likes to think of music as a metaphor for poetry, one might believe that Stevens feels his poetry has lost some spunk, that it cannot continue to carry the energy of human desire and emotion. However, Stevens does make a distinction between the waltz and music itself. Perhaps it is the “old music” (as he says) that cannot adequately express desire. Perhaps what Stevens is saying is that a new music is needed, a new poetry that connects human desire with actual humans. That is, he wants to write a poetry that puts human beings back in touch with their desire through language. This desire for connection seems to be a powerful theme at work in “The Idea of Order at Key West.”
In his poem, “Ghosts As Cocoons,” Stevens writes, “Where is sun and music and highest heaven’s lust, / For which more than any words cries deeplier?” The cry is the vocalization of internal desire — the internal made external. Likewise, the new music is that which takes the internal movements of the old and transforms them into an inclusive, communal vision of the new. For Stevens, the great project of poetry is to transform private vision (the vision of the poet) into a public vision (the vision of his readers and the world around him). This is exactly what the female singer accomplishes in “The Idea of Order at Key West” and why this poem serves as a nice metaphor for his work as a whole. He wants his poetry to have the same effect on his readers that the woman’s song has on the speaker of the poem.
Yet, the speaker remains separate from the shadowy singer in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” and some reasons why that is might provide some insight into the transformation the speaker goes through in the poem. The gay waltz in the poem mentioned above goes unnamed. It could be any waltz, played anywhere. But “Idea of Order” is firmly located along the shores of Florida. This is important because the opening poem in Ideas of Order is not a welcoming but a farewell. Oddly enough, the first poem is entitled “Farewell to Florida.” While few critics have noted the relationship of the two poems, there remains both explicitly and implicitly a fundamental affinity between them. The female singer in “The Idea of Order” exists as a detached, solitary figure. In the poem, she rather matter-of-factly distances herself from the person who is narrating the events. Such is the case in “Farewell to Florida,” where the poet also remains distant from the female presence. But oddly enough for Stevens, opposites attract. The idea of distance makes the woman appealing. It is her detachment that seduces Stevens because it gives him perspective.
Again, desire and seduction remain key themes for Stevens because of his own desire for his poems to seduce his readers. But he knows that to do this, his poems must be attractive on an emotional level. People must be able to feel his poems. But, like most men of Stevens’ era, he is uncomfortable with intimate emotions; thus his poetry is a constant struggle between the intellect and emotion. This conflict is the subject of “Farewell to Florida.” The text of “Farewell to Florida” tells of a relieved Stevens who longs to return to his ordered northern (male) state of mind, but the subtext reveals something entirely different:
From my North of cold whistled in a sepulchralSouth,
Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea,
Her home, not mine, in the ever-freshened Keys,
Her days, her oceanic nights, calling
Often Stevens associates the muse (the Greek goddesses who were in charge of inspiring poets and composers) with the tropics of Florida. Stevens is also seduced in “The Idea of Order at Key West” but not by the lushness of the woman, rather by her song. In both instances, Stevens’ desire takes on a sort of rage, the likes of which readers do not find in Harmonium. The famous literary critic Harold Bloom, in his book Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, claims that this “is so erotic a stanza that the reader needs to keep reminding himself that this Florida, as a state of mind, is a trope of pathos, a synecdoche for desire and not desire itself.” True indeed, the passage is beautiful and painful. Florida and what Florida might represent to Stevens (lushness, the feminine, emotion, poetry) is an object of desire.
Because he cannot inhabit this intense landscape, he flees to the north, to the world of the snowman, the world of “the violent mind.” But he is mistaken to think he can leave the muse or what Jacqueline Vaught Brogan has called his “feminine self” behind. For Stevens, Florida becomes a muse in and of itself because the South, like the muse and desire, is alive, cyclical, pungent, and ebbing. And because Stevens wants this for his poetry, the manifestation of Florida, the singing female, returns like Odysseus to the poetic ground of her making in Stevens’ wonderful poem “The Idea of Order at Key West.”
Not only does the singing female return, but she does so in an enhanced capacity. Of the moving first stanza, the most important lines are the first, “She sang beyond the genius of the sea” and the last two, “That was not ours although we understood, / Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.” The two most important words are “beyond” and “inhuman.” Indeed, taken together, the two words suggest a certain ekstasis, a virtual transcendence beyond the human realm. The song and singer are not “masks,” nor are they anything but themselves; however, Stevens is only able to comprehend both in terms of otherness. They are not him. They are not male or northern. They are separate.
While Stevens and the singer overtly maintain a remoteness, readers should not miss the fact that Stevens does understand her. He hears what she is singing. He understands her because she is forming ideas into language. Yet Stevens also understands that he cannot translate her song into purely linguistic or human codes. What she is singing is not only beyond understanding, it also reaches beyond language: “But it was more than that, / More even than her voice, and ours, among / The meaningless plungings of water and the wind.” But just as it seems like the poem is going to drift off into the ocean, Stevens brings it back to earth in the next two stanzas. What makes this an amazing poem is his ability to represent inhuman moments in human terms. Or better put, he uses language to express that which is beyond language. Like the singer’s song, his poem helps transform the world. Stevens helps readers fulfill their own desires to see a richer, fuller world.
“For all of his continuing fascination with lush tropical landscapes and fecund nature, Stevens is not even sure that the world outside of his mind even exists.”
The idea that the poet is a kind of facilitator is fairly new for Stevens in the 1930s. Many people think that “The Idea of Order at Key West” marks a turning point for him, that it signals a shift from the old music of Harmonium to the new, more inclusive music of Ideas of Order. For instance, in Stevens’ often quoted poem, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” a major poem in Harmonium, Hoon’s chant utterly transforms the external landscape, but in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the Floridian landscape goes unchanged. It remains in disorder. The singer does not alter the external world the way Hoon does. The world goes on. Stevens realizes this and accepts it. The singer does not try to order the world. She simply sings. Neither does the listener try to order the world. He merely listens and allows the song to do the transforming. This is the new Stevens, and this the new song. The Stevens of Harmonium would have ended the poem after the fifth stanza, just a few more lines after the above quote, but the Stevens of 1934 adds two, somewhat puzzling stanzas, the most notable aspect of which shows Stevens turning not inward but outward:
Ramon Fernandez, tell me if you know,Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
The temptation is to remain, like the woman and like Hoon, in solitude, but Stevens and his companion do not turn away toward the sea (where order may be found) but toward the town, toward civilization, toward humanity. Of course the criticism can be made that a simple turn of the body is hardly an affirmative social avowal — why couldn’t Stevens have simply said “I share this with all of you?” — but Stevens works subtly. His only overt social poem, “Owl’s Clover,” is considered by most a failure. In Stevens, gesture can be everything. While the act of singing is an act of individual will, turning that will back toward a shared experience and not inward is what delineates this poem from “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” and other similar Harmonium poems. Stevens’ rage in this final stanza is the rage for the “tortured words” and the “vital words” that speak concurrently for the past, present, and future. Furthermore, it is the “sibylline presence,” the female singer who returns as the muse bearing the word on her voice. Through the act of poetry, Stevens is able to translate her voice and his desire into a collective voice, one that speaks and sings of the inhuman (“ghostlier demarcations”) and the human (“ourselves and our origins”).
Music continues to serve as an important motif for Stevens in Ideas of Order because music and poetry elicit a similar affectivity. Music for Stevens is essentially internal, as is poetry. Readers may hear the external notes of music, but they feel the traces the music leaves in their ears. The same goes for poetry. Music is something that is ultimately “taken in” and released over and over in the mind. The female singer in “The Idea of Order at Key West” is not just a singer but a composer both in the musical sense and in the etymological sense (from the Latin posere, “to place or to lie down with”). Stevens associates music with both emotion and motion, and he associates all three with poetry and with the harmonies and cacophonies of human desire. So in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Stevens actually says hello to the feminine presence that he originally said farewell to in “Farewell to Florida,” and in so doing, he says hello to his feminine self. It is that self, his internal, emotive self, that allows him to link poem and song in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” offering readers a vision of a world in which internal and external also begin to harmonize, fulfilling both his and others’ desires.
Source: Dean Rader, Critical Essay on “The Idea of Order at Key West,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.
Greg Barnhisel
Barnhisel teaches American literature and has published articles on Ezra Pound and on the publishing industry. In this essay, he argues that “The Idea of Order at Key West” expresses Stevens’ most deeply-held questions about the degree to which human perception organizes the world around the person doing the perceiving.
Along with “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and “Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order at Key West” is one of Wallace Stevens’ best-known and most anthologized poems. Like many of his works, the poem takes place largely in the head of the narrator and is a meditation on the idea of thinking, on the process of perception, on the faculty of the imagination. From his earliest days as a poet until the end of his life, Stevens’ most persistent concern remained the interaction of mind and world. Is the world out there real? Does it have a material existence apart from humans perceiving it? Or is the world as it is seen, heard, and felt just a projection of human imagination? If not, is imagination somehow organizing or ordering the world for humans?
This final question is the one that drives “The Idea of Order at Key West.” The poem takes place as the narrator, who is probably Stevens himself (although persona is not an essential aspect of this poem), is walking along the beach in Key West, Florida, and listening to a woman sing. Her song makes him see some kind of order in the natural world, and he begins to wonder whether her singing created that order or whether it just allowed him to see the order.
The book in which the poem in question appears takes its title from the poem. Ideas of Order contains many poems meditating on these issues, but Stevens’ first book, Harmonium (1923), introduces these themes powerfully. Two of that book’s poems in particular, “Anecdote of the Jar” and “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” are prefigurations of “The Idea of Order at Key West.” In “Anecdote of the Jar,” the narrator speaks of placing a jar upon a hill; this jar makes “slovenly” the wilderness that “surround that hill.” Continuing with his discussion of the jar’s effect on the landscape, the narrator notes how the presence of the jar made the wilderness “no longer wild.” Its presence organizes the apparently chaotic world around it. Throughout the poem, the narrator contrasts the disorganized fecundity of nature with the sterile organization of the manmade object. The final stanza sums up the jar’s effects on the landscape:
It took dominion everywhere.The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
The similarities to “The Idea of Order at Key West” are striking. In this poem, the narrator again contrasts manmade art, in this case, a simple jar, with the vast multiplicity of nature. Although he does not actually use the term in either poem, he is clearly referring to it, and in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” he calls the singer an “artificer.” Stevens does not mean art in the sense that someone uses the word-products of the creative process that are intended for aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment. Rather Stevens is using the term with its full etymological resonance. The word art derives from an Indo-European root that means “to join or fit together.” From this root are derived any number of English words that indicate different types of joining or making: artifice, artisan, artifact, artful, articulate, and artificial are examples. Art is organized. It has a principle of order. In the poem, the power of human imagination, which always strives for order and organization, brings out the order in nature.
But, Stevens always asks himself, is the order inherent in nature or does the presence of an artifact that is ordered cause humans to see order that might not really be there? Another of the poems from Harmonium proposes an answer to that question. The first stanza of “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” in the voice of an unnamed narrator, tells in a highly abstract tone of the narrator’s “descent” through “the loneliest air”. The second stanza provides us with three questions asked by the narrator: what is the ointment “sprinkled” on his beard? What songs does he hear? What sea carries him? The third stanza answers these questions: his mind provided the ointment, his ears made the “hymns,” and the sea was nothing but the world of the poet himself. Concluding the poem, Stevens’ narrator tells us that
I was the world in which I walked, and what I sawOr heard or felt came not by from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more
strange.
In “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” the narrator responds to the implicit questions of the “Anecdote of the Jar.” The vivid sensual experiences of the second stanza are, he tells the reader, a product of “my mind” and have no basis in the real world. The sensual world is a product of the mind, the narrator says in this poem. Whether or not the world outside of the mind even exists is called into question (and this is a question that is never far from Stevens’ mind).
The two Harmonium poems, read together, propose the preeminence of the human mind and of the faculty of the imagination. For all of his continuing fascination with lush tropical landscapes and fecund nature, Stevens is not even sure that the world outside of his mind even exists. Thirteen years later in “Key West,” Stevens returns to these issues and brings together his ideas about how human imagination orders experience of the outside world with his suspicions that the human mind might actually create the outside world.
Stevens introduces the idea of creation in the very first line. “She sang beyond the genius of the sea,” he tells the readers. “Genius” here must be seen not only in its customary sense, as meaning a great natural ability or intelligence. The word, which derives from a Latin word meaning a “guardian spirit,” can also mean the particular spirit of a place or thing and a great natural talent for creating. Already Stevens is searching for a way to explore the difference between what is inherent in nature (“the genius of the sea” meaning the particular spirit of the sea) and what comes from human consciousness (“genius” meaning the woman’s ability to create). The sea does not form “to mind or voice,” Stevens specifies, meaning that no physical changes can be seen in the water, yet the sea “made constant cry,” presumably in response to the song of the singer.
The next stanza continues the theme of the first stanza, further differentiating between the actual sea and the singer: Stevens wants to be certain that he is not confusing the two. In this, he is implicitly responding to the statements he makes in “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” stating that nature is not created by the perceiver.
In the third stanza, the poem begins to respond to the questions that Stevens set out to address. The real subject of the poem is “the spirit that we sought.” This “spirit” is not, Stevens takes pains to make clear in the fourth stanza, simply the voice of nature: “If it was only the dark voice of the sea . . . / If it was only the outer voice of sky / And cloud . . . / . . . it would have been deep air / . . . sound alone.” But, he makes clear, “it was more than that.”
When Stevens breaks the long fourth stanza in the middle, he signals the fundamental break in the poem, which is structured as a question and answer, a cause and effect. The “spirit” mentioned in the third stanza is the creative drive, the imagination, the expressive activity of the singer. “It was her voice that made / The sky acutest at its vanishing. / She measured to the hour its solitude. / She was the single artificer of the world / In which she sang.” The vocabulary that Stevens chooses to describe the singer’s effect — “acutest,” “measured,” “artificer” — is the vocabulary of organization, order, exactitude. The jar of “Anecdote of the Jar” comes to mind.
As that stanza proceeds, though, Stevens modifies his earlier rejection of the idea of human consciousness creating the world, and the reader must confront a conundrum: if the sea does exist beyond the singer, how can the singer be the “single artificer of the world / In which she sang”? When she sang, the narrator states, “the sea, / Whatever self it had, became the self / That was her song, for she was the maker.” So Stevens seems to be saying that the sea does have an independent existence outside of human perception, but no one can know the nature of that existence.
And the location of the singer? Singing, creating, she is lost in her creation. “There never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made,” the poet says. But the location of the singer is not the only issue for the poet. He also wants to know what happens to the hearer and, by extension, to the audience of any human creation, or “artifice,” and to the hearer’s relationship to the natural world during and after the song.
Here Stevens begins speaking to his companion on the beach, Ramon Fernandez. Writing to the critic Renato Poggioli in 1954 (letter reprinted in Letters of Wallace Stevens), Stevens denied that the name Ramon Fernandez was intended to refer to the actual Ramon Fernandez, a French critic: “When I was trying to think of a Spanish name for “The Idea of Order,” Stevens asserts, “I simply put together by chance two exceedingly common names in order to make one and I did not have in mind Ramon Fernandez.” The critic Harold Bloom, among others, argues that Stevens’ denials are specious, but for the purposes of this essay, that is not important. The narrator asks Fernandez, “Why, when the singing ended and we turned / Toward the town,” the lights and visual sensations seemed to be ordered, organized, regular?
The last stanza begins with one of the most familiar phrases in Stevens’ poetry: “Oh! Blessed rage for order.” As the poem ends, Stevens seems to be saying that the human mind craves order in the universe and that the human imagination will impose order upon the chaotic natural world. In a letter that Stevens wrote, in 1935 (reprinted in Letters of Wallace Stevens), to his friend Ronald Lane Latimer (who edited the magazine Alcestis, in which Stevens published poems), Stevens explains that in “The Idea of Order at Key West”
life has ceased to be a matter of chance. It may be that every man introduces his own order into the life around him and that the idea of order in general is simply what Bishop Berkeley might have called a fortuitous concourse of personal orders. But still there is order.
The poem is probably Stevens’ most important poem on the activities of the human mind when confronted by the sensory overload of nature. Responding to his poems of the 1920s, in which he explored the possibility of human consciousness creating the world around it, Stevens, in this poem, has arrived at the conclusion that human imagination does not create the world, but rather creates the order that is in the world and imposes that order on nature.
Source: Greg Barnhisel, Critical Essay on “The Idea of Order at Key West,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.
Wendy Perkins
Perkins is an associate professor at Prince George’s Community College and has published widely in the field of twentieth-century American and British literature. In the following essay, she explores Stevens’s poem as a celebration of the power of imagination.
In a letter written in November 1935, approximately one year after he wrote “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Stevens comments on the role of poets:
We are not beginning to get out of the world what it will ultimately yield through poets. If poetry introduces order, and every competent poem introduces order, and if order means peace, even though that particular peace is an illusion, is it any less an illusion than a good many other things that everyone high and low now-a-days concedes to be no longer of any account? Isn’t a freshening of life a thing of consequence? It would be a great thing to change the status of the poet.
Stevens believed that it was the duty of poets to create works of art that could help readers order the chaotic experience of life. According to Stevens’ premise, through the imagination of the poet, the world would become more understandable and thus the reader would experience “a freshening of life” and a sense of peace, even if that peace were only temporary or illusory. Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West” provides one of his best examples of this theory of the power of the poetic imagination.
William Burney, in his critical study in his book Wallace Stevens, notes that “the inner focus [in “The Idea of Order at Key West”] is not in the self of the poet but in the world of his poem: what Stevens later called ‘my green, my fluent mundo.’” Although the poem opens with a reference to a
“According to Stevens’ premise, through the imagination of the poet, the world would become more understandable and thus the reader would experience ‘a freshening of life’ and a sense of peace, even if that peace were only temporary or illusory.”
woman singing by the sea, the focus is on that sea, which becomes a metaphor for human experience and how it can be changed through artistic expression. The poem contains a single concentrated image of meditation from beginning to end on this dominant theme. As the speaker listens to the girl’s song, he contemplates the relation of poetry to reality and the power of the imagination.
The sea suggests a state of chaos in its “constant cry,” “grinding water,” and “gasping wind.” Later, Stevens reinforces these images with his description of “the ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea” expressing a “dark voice.” Here, the turbulence of the water symbolizes the turbulence of life. The poem illustrates the difficult task of understanding the flux of life in the following lines:
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
The poem asserts Stevens’ point that the poet’s role is to help readers make sense of “the meaningless plungings” of existence. The “poet” in “The Idea of Order at Key West” is represented by a woman singing as she walks the beach at Key West. In the first stanza, Stevens illustrates the power of imagination in his juxtaposition of poetry and reality. While the sea contains its own “genius” it “never formed to mind or voice, / Like a body wholly body, fluttering / Its empty sleeves.”
The poem contains a number of careful definitions and rejections where the speaker makes a clear distinction between the woman’s song and the voice of the sea:
It may be that in all her phrases stirredThe grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
The speaker acknowledges that “she was the maker of the song she sang.” When he questions what spirit he hears through her song, he again makes a clear distinction between her voice and that of the sea:
If it was only the dark voice of the seaThat rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours
Her song orders the turbulent sea and so makes it significant and comprehensible to the speaker who hears her:
It was her voice that madeThe sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then
we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Lucy Beckett, in her book on Stevens, notes, “As the poem gathers weight . . . the issues raised by the solitary figure of the girl become wider.” The speaker begins to realize at this point that the girl’s song is affecting not only his vision of the sea, but also his perspective on the surrounding landscape. He asks his companion,
Why, when the singing ended and we turnedToward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Beckett argues that
in the end the question is not answered at all; but the poem’s marvelous conclusion, suggests in its triumphant but still calm cadences a glimpsed victory over poverty that could be the poet’s or could be any man’s. ‘The spirit that we sought’ is not defined, but it is found and found in human sense made of non-human senseless reality.
The poem itself answers the question the speaker raises. As the speaker notes the effect the girl’s song has on the listeners’ vision of their environment, the poem becomes a metaphor for the transforming power of the poetic voice. The song has stimulated and sensitized the listeners’ imagination that organizes and clarifies their experience.
In the same letter quoted in the introduction, Stevens adds,
There is no reason why any poet should not have the status of the philosopher, nor why his poetry should not give up to the keenest minds and the most searching spirits something of what philosophy gives up and, in addition, the peculiar things that only poetry can give.
In “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Stevens has created a poem that gives “to the keenest minds and most searching spirits” his philosophy of the power of poetry. The poem offers, “Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, / And of ourselves and of our origins, / In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.” The final image is of the poet’s rage to order the words of the sea, with its constantly changing ebbs, flows, and moods that symbolize the chaos of human existence. Those “fragrant portals” become doorways into a deeper experience as the poem helps readers order and therefore more fully comprehend their world.
Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on “The Idea of Order at Key West,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.
“Perhaps what Stevens is saying is that a new music is needed, a new poetry that connects human desire with actual humans. That is, he wants to write a poetry that puts human beings back in touch with their desire through language.”
