The Idea of Order at Key West

"The Idea of Order at Key West" is a poem written in 1934 by Modernist poet Wallace Stevens. It is one of many poems included in his book, Ideas of Order. It was also included in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

"The Idea of Order at Key West" takes place on the island Key West in the state of Florida. Though the island was mostly isolated before the 1900s, its military post and the creation of a rail route to the mainland led to an increase in population and tourists. Many literary artists such as Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost frequently visited Key West and drew inspiration from its environment; and also among them was Stevens, who met the two men on different occasions. As with many other poems of Stevens', "The Idea of Order at Key West" introduces dissonance between reality and perception. A common theme throughout his poems examines imagination and the concept of creating art.

The narrator and his friend watch as a woman "sang beyond the genius of the sea". As she sings, the narrator compares her voice to the ocean's; though the woman mimicked the ocean, "it was she and not the sea we heard". While he ponders over this observation, the woman eventually leaves. Her singing left a strong impression on him: as he and friend turn towards the town, he sees the world differently.

Structurally, the poem is written in five stanzas of various lengths. In the first stanza, the narrator observes how a woman sings the sounds she heard from the ocean. Though the woman "sang what she heard", the song and the ocean remain divided: the separation between the natural, inhuman and "veritable" ocean was too great for the woman's song to bridge. Despite the un-"medleyed sound", the men hear the woman over the ocean "for she was the maker of the song she sang". A central question of the poem ends the stanza inquiring whose "spirit" the men heard.

In the second stanza, the narrator wonders at a world with "only the dark voice of the sea". The lack of other life leaves the natural world of the ocean barren and empty. He begins to see that there was "more" to the world than "her voice, and ours, among / The meaningless plungings of water and the wind".

...
Wikipedia