Mod.pod: Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West

 

The Modern Poetry Podcast is back. Our own @langevine, Caitlin, joins me to talk about The Idea of Order at Key West, the most beautiful of the poems of Wallace Stevens — American modernist, businessman, winner of the Pulitzer, and the most eminent figure to be pummeled savagely by Hemingway. Next week, we’re publishing our thoughts on 13 ways of looking at a blackbird. Please listen, share, comment, and rate/review us on iTunes.

You can listen to Wallace Stevens reading his poem here:

Or you can read it for yourselves online.

I want to add a few notes. The poem that best resembles it, so far as I know, is Pindar’s celebrated First Olympian ode.

Critics, however, tend to note the resemblance to a Romantic poem by Wordsworth, The solitary reaper. Because it also features a lonely woman singing a song the poet is wondering about.

I’ll add another thing that struck me–the dark voice of the sea & the colored waves recall to mind a section at the end of T.S.Eliot’s The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

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  1. Manny Coolidge
    Manny
    @Manny

    You guys were great.  I totally enjoyed this.  Here’s where I might expand on your thoughts.  Almost at the middle of the poem, the narrator asks,

    Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
    It was the spirit that we sought and knew
    That we should ask this often as she sang.

    Whose spirit is this?  If it’s not the ocean or the natural elements, and she was the artificer, then where did her inspiration come from?  If only she had the material elements to work with, what was the genius that is beyond the ocean or natural elements?  Further down he asks another question, and let me eliminate the apposite words and get to the kernel of question.

    Ramon Fernandez, …
    Why, when the singing ended and we turned
    Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights…
    Mastered the night and portioned out the sea

    Strange that there is no question mark in the punctuation.  But the question hangs, why did the singing alter our views, “master the night” and “portion out the sea” if it’s all part of the material world.  The tension it seems to me is between the material world and the immaterial world.  Then comes that enigmatic last stanza.

    Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
    The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
    Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
    And of ourselves and of our origins,
    In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

    Why is rage for order “blessed”?  What portal are the words taking us through?  To what?  And why are demarcations ghostly?  Is the singer touching upon the divine creation, that genius of the ocean from Genesis?  Is the portal into the divine?  Who is the maker in “The maker’s rage to order words of the sea”?  Surely to use the diction of “maker” has to lead the reader to expand toward a thought of God.  A skilled poet like Stevens would never have arbitrarily used that word if he did not intend to bring in the allusion.  In that line it seems to me that Stevens has created a double meaning, maker being the singer and maker being God. Is the singer in her song of the material world touching on a place we might call divine?

    I know Stevens was supposed to be an atheist, there are just too many places where suggestion of divine fulfills his poem’s meaning.

    • #1
  2. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    This post wasn’t really on The Idea of Order, but kinda sorta. One thought from it –

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake:Wallace Stevens, in The Idea of Order at Key West, observes that human song in imitation of the sea nonetheless goes “beyond the genius of the sea”, imposes an order upon the sea that the sea by itself could never have…

    The narrator and his companion find that, after witnessing the song, the everyday lights of civilization, little human lights often overlooked as unremarkable, “Master[] the night and portion[] out the sea, / Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, / Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.” The humble jigsaw of human ownership leaves the night an even more beautiful dark thing. No one who lit those lights intended to deepen the night, it’s just what happens with human lights, just for being human.

    It’s not a good answer, admittedly, but it was happened to be on my mind at the time. The way we choose to see the lights also masters the night and portions out the sea. If we were to draw the scene, for example, we would impose an order on the scene, apportioning regions between various features of the image. That order only exists because a human eye is looking at it.

    I probably shouldn’t let these apportionments remind me of the humorous poem “Legal Fiction” (which is read atrociously here, and whose text is squirreled away at the bottom of this page). But they do.

     

    • #2
  3. Titus Techera Contributor
    Titus Techera
    @TitusTechera

    So night is not said to be beautiful or to be made beautiful. The attraction, which is not beauty, is man’s striving against night. Notice that the stars go unmentioned; the lights are of human making. The eternal goes unmentioned; the temporary is what we focus on.

    How ‘enchanting’ is to be understood is unclear, but the weight of the evidence would seem to be to follow on the obvious ‘arranging’ & ‘deepening’–it seems that human striving, being what it is, has this effect articulated in the triad of verbs. Probably, the meaning is not sentimental: The limits of perception & human achievement are palpable.

    • #3
  4. Titus Techera Contributor
    Titus Techera
    @TitusTechera

    Manny (View Comment):I know Stevens was supposed to be an atheist, there are just too many places where suggestion of divine fulfills his poem’s meaning.

    He really was an atheist. His poetry is not infrequently looking for alternatives or posing alternatives to Christianity &, indeed, any faith.

    His self-chosen theme is how to put man & nature together, ‘she’ & ‘the sea’. They cannot be mixed even as sound, because the one has the order of utterance–the other does not. There’s no talking between them. Man is defined by his speech & his reason. Stevens makes the point by showing off rationalism–a syllogism–when he talks about the order of words.

    The woman is called the ‘sole artificer’ & she is said to have no world except the one ‘she sang &, singing, made.’ God’s providence or God’s paradise are not on offer.

    So the connection between the man of faith & the atheist poet in this case is, they both understand that man is not really at home in the world. But the poem doesn’t look beyond this world to God or Heaven. He looks to man’s own noble striving to order the chaos.

    • #4
  5. Manny Coolidge
    Manny
    @Manny

    So if this is strictly a materialist world view, then four questions:

    (1) What is “the genius of the sea” alluding to?

    (2) Third stanza, “Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew /It was the spirit that we sought and knew ” what spirit is it that they knew?

    (3) How does a materialist world view “master the night” and “portion out the sea” through song, vibrations of sound in the throat?

    (4) What is the “fragrant portal” an entrance to?

    Frankly this poem only makes sense having a transcendentalist world view. You guys explained it great until the last stanza, and then frankly you floundered trying to understand the close. Yes, there is the subjective perspective and individual creative element, but there is more. If you look at the poem from a strictly materialist perspective, then the closing makes no sense. The close reaches an aesthetically satisfying conclusion with the return to the “genius” that overhangs everything in the poem. Stevens, in my opinion, is working in the American Transcendentalist tradition.

    • #5
  6. Titus Techera Contributor
    Titus Techera
    @TitusTechera

    Manny (View Comment):
    So if this is strictly a materialist world view, then four questions:

    (1) What is “the genius of the sea” alluding to?

    Read the first stanza again. The genius of the sea is rehearsed as the veritable ocean. It’s inhuman, but natural.

    (2) Third stanza, “Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew /It was the spirit that we sought and knew ” what spirit is it that they knew?

    You’re misreading, partially. The poem says they knew that they should ask this often as she sang. Not that they know the spirit, which would of course defeat the purpose of asking…

    (3) How does a materialist world view “master the night” and “portion out the sea” through song, vibrations of sound in the throat?

    Again, an obvious misreading. The poem that talks about mastering the night, portioning out the sea interprets what the lights on the shipmasts are doing, presumably on behalf of the men who put them there in the first place. That’s practical–it’s a description of how human beings live.

    (4) What is the “fragrant portal” an entrance to?

    Read that stanza again. It is only words about fragrant portals that are mentioned, with an emphasis on ordering words, or speech & reasoning. Whatever the portals themselves may be, that is not where the poem is going.

    Frankly this poem only makes sense having a transcendentalist world view. You guys explained it great until the last stanza, and then frankly you floundered trying to understand the close. Yes, there is the subjective perspective and individual creative element, but there is more. If you look at the poem from a strictly materialist perspective, then the closing makes no sense. The close reaches an aesthetically satisfying conclusion with the return to the “genius” that overhangs everything in the poem. Stevens, in my opinion, is working in the American Transcendentalist tradition.

    As a judgment on Stevens, this is unequivocally wrong. Not merely on the strength of critical opinion–but just read the man’s poems, he’s not a transcendentalist. We will offer more evidence as the series goes on. But you can just go read Man carrying thing. Or the famous Emperor of ice-cream. Or Sunday morning. Or what you will–in fact, if you do have some poem in mind that would give evidence of this transcendentalism, I’d be grateful if you shared it.

    There is also a mistake you make in the way of thinking about these things. The materialist-transcendentalist dichotomy is of no particular importance to Stevens. No more would it be relevant to discussing Hemingway’s Old man & the sea. Confronting nature & figuring out where man stands to it doesn’t involve these derivative ideologies–it’s supposed to be primary, original.

    • #6
  7. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Titus Techera (View Comment):
    So night is not said to be beautiful or to be made beautiful.

    No, just arranged, deepened, and enchanted. “Deepened” may mean merely “made darker by comparison”. But the girl’s order imposed on the sea is a song, and the lights’ order imposed on the night is arrangement and enchantment. A song ought to be beautiful, and arrangement also has an aesthetic purpose.

    The attraction, which is not beauty, is man’s striving against night.

    I don’t think the attraction is only the striving itself. It’s the order humans impose on the night – which isn’t some chaotic striving, but aesthetically satisfying. Which is why the harbor lights don’t just master the night, but portion out the sea, arrange, deepen, and enchant. They are making a mastery attractive to the narrator’s aesthetic sense, which I think is fairly called “beauty”.

    Notice that the stars go unmentioned; the lights are of human making.

    It may just be some eccentricity of my own mind that read of the human lights’ “Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles” and pictured the human lights fixing the stars in their proper place, just as the sound of the girl’s singing gives the sound of the sea its proper place.

    How ‘enchanting’ is to be understood is unclear, but the weight of the evidence would seem to be to follow on the obvious ‘arranging’ & ‘deepening’–it seems that human striving, being what it is, has this effect articulated in the triad of verbs. Probably, the meaning is not sentimental: The limits of perception & human achievement are palpable.

    Maybe the enchantment is order, and order is the human achievement. Without humans, who see or make, there’s no order, no enchantment.

    • #7
  8. Manny Coolidge
    Manny
    @Manny

    OK, I can buy some of what you say Titus, but why does Stevens continually use the diction of the Transcendentalists: “genius,” “spirit,” “portal,” the allusion to Genesis, which is rather obvious.  He didn’t have to use those words.  If your reading is correct, it strikes me as either an immense lack of clarity or a desire to play with the reader, either way is not being fair as a writer.  And how does her song create order in other people’s minds?  How does one jump the gap from one mind to another if there is nothing in between?

    • #8
  9. Titus Techera Contributor
    Titus Techera
    @TitusTechera

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):

    Titus Techera (View Comment):
    So night is not said to be beautiful or to be made beautiful.

    No, just arranged, deepened, and enchanted. “Deepened” may mean merely “made darker by comparison”. But the girl’s order imposed on the sea is a song, and the lights’ order imposed on the night is arrangement and enchantment. A song ought to be beautiful, and arrangement also has an aesthetic purpose.

    The attraction, which is not beauty, is man’s striving against night.

    I don’t think the attraction is only the striving itself. It’s the order humans impose on the night – which isn’t some chaotic striving, but aesthetically satisfying. Which is why the harbor lights don’t just master the night, but portion out the sea, arrange, deepen, and enchant. They are making a mastery attractive to the narrator’s aesthetic sense, which I think is fairly called “beauty”.

    Notice that the stars go unmentioned; the lights are of human making.

    It may just be some eccentricity of my own mind that read of the human lights’ “Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles” and pictured the human lights fixing the stars in their proper place, just as the sound of the girl’s singing gives the sound of the sea its proper place.

    How ‘enchanting’ is to be understood is unclear, but the weight of the evidence would seem to be to follow on the obvious ‘arranging’ & ‘deepening’–it seems that human striving, being what it is, has this effect articulated in the triad of verbs. Probably, the meaning is not sentimental: The limits of perception & human achievement are palpable.

    Maybe the enchantment is order, and order is the human achievement. Without humans, who see or make, there’s no order, no enchantment.

    What’s the relation you see between order & enchantment?

    The man is saying black on white that rage is for order. Why would you read striving as chaotic? The point is that making order is a striving! You’re supposed to move in the direction of confronting the character of human action as such.

    • #9
  10. Titus Techera Contributor
    Titus Techera
    @TitusTechera

    Manny (View Comment):
    OK, I can buy some of what you say Titus, but why does Stevens continually use the diction of the Transcendentalists: “genius,” “spirit,” “portal,” the allusion to Genesis, which is rather obvious. He didn’t have to use those words. If your reading is correct, it strikes me as either an immense lack of clarity or a desire to play with the reader, either way is not being fair as a writer. And how does her song create order in other people’s minds? How does one jump the gap from one mind to another if there is nothing in between?

    I dunno about the last part. Stevens let’s you know how tough the problem is: Ramon does not answer when asked. He only shows an answer by the pallor the narrator attributes to him at a crucial moment. The woman’s song is never described except indirectly, by a series of negative experiences–which are the narrator’s experiences, not the woman’s who is singing.

    As for the allusion to Genesis, its purpose is obvious once you see that it’s not only to Genesis. Hemingway’s later story does the same. Pindar’s first Olympian ode also starts from the words: Water is best. (Then moves to fire, then to poetry & tyranny.) The opinion that water is fundamental or the origin is not just to Genesis; it is also among Greeks; Norsemen; &c. & the notion of an artificer ordering the world by giving form to formless matter is also there in Plato’s Timaeus. It’s not obvious why it should be strictly Biblical–if anything, Stevens leans against the Bible by saying that ordering & making is not from nothing, not really creation…

    Lack of clarity of course describes the poetry of a man who started another poem by saying, The poem should resists intelligence almost successfully. The point is to learn from him what’s on his mind, not to impose on him what you want. He cannot teach you anything if you’re too willful…

    • #10
  11. Manny Coolidge
    Manny
    @Manny

    OK, you might be right.  But it still feels Transcedentalist!  ;-)

    By the way, I have been reading Stevens for thirty years or so, off and on, of course.  I said this poem had a Transcedentalist theme, not all of his poetry.  His use of imagination strikes me as a development and progression of Transcedentalism.  What exactly is – and I mean that philosophically – the imagination for Stevens?  The imagination to alter our perceptions traces back to the Romantics, who were the predecessors of the Transcendentalist.  If he is rejecting that, then he must mean something specific.

    • #11
  12. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Titus Techera (View Comment):
    What’s the relation you see between order & enchantment?

    Order is a “spell” or “enchantment” humans impose on the world.

    The man is saying black on white that rage is for order. Why would you read striving as chaotic? The point is that making order is a striving! You’re supposed to move in the direction of confronting the character of human action as such.

    It’s possible we aren’t in disagreement here?…

    • #12
  13. Titus Techera Contributor
    Titus Techera
    @TitusTechera

    Manny (View Comment):
    OK, you might be right. But it still feels Transcedentalist! ;-)

    By the way, I have been reading Stevens for thirty years or so, off and on, of course. I said this poem had a Transcedentalist theme, not all of his poetry. His use of imagination strikes me as a development and progression of Transcedentalism. What exactly is – and I mean that philosophically – the imagination for Stevens? The imagination to alter our perceptions traces back to the Romantics, who were the predecessors of the Transcendentalist. If he is rejecting that, then he must mean something specific.

    Of course he’s rejecting that! He thinks the poem should resist intellect almost successfully. He seems to think poetry is the proper education about the true situation of man in the world, & its predicament. Our next podcast–now editing–is about 13 ways of looking at a blackbird. You’ll see there both how rationalistic he is in his puzzle-making, how subtle in the themes he broaches & the underlying motion of the action of the poem or suite, & how skeptical he is that rationality is as unimaginative as our scientific age inclines people to believe…

    Not that you couldn’t compare him to Emerson. He’s got nothing in common with the Romantic fantasy people often make of Emerson–but neither did the real Emerson.

    • #13
  14. Titus Techera Contributor
    Titus Techera
    @TitusTechera

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):

    Titus Techera (View Comment):
    What’s the relation you see between order & enchantment?

    Order is a “spell” or “enchantment” humans impose on the world.

    The man is saying black on white that rage is for order. Why would you read striving as chaotic? The point is that making order is a striving! You’re supposed to move in the direction of confronting the character of human action as such.

    It’s possible we aren’t in disagreement here?…

    I dunno… With you, weird things come up that neither the poet nor I said. Then they maybe go away. Who knows…

    As for your other opinion–you probably want to rethink that. To begin with, what do you mean by putting the words in quotes? That order is not really a spell–nor really an enchantment? Or what kind of spell or enchantment? The poem is serious about understanding human making in light of poetic making–as a striving for order.

    • #14
  15. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Titus Techera (View Comment):
    The poem is serious about understanding human making in light of poetic making–as a striving for order.

    Yes!

    • #15
  16. Titus Techera Contributor
    Titus Techera
    @TitusTechera

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):

    Titus Techera (View Comment):
    The poem is serious about understanding human making in light of poetic making–as a striving for order.

    Yes!

    Maybe you are right & we disagree less than I thought. Maybe I’m just confused!

    • #16
  17. Manny Coolidge
    Manny
    @Manny

    Titus Techera (View Comment):

    Manny (View Comment):
    OK, you might be right. But it still feels Transcedentalist! ;-)

    By the way, I have been reading Stevens for thirty years or so, off and on, of course. I said this poem had a Transcedentalist theme, not all of his poetry. His use of imagination strikes me as a development and progression of Transcedentalism. What exactly is – and I mean that philosophically – the imagination for Stevens? The imagination to alter our perceptions traces back to the Romantics, who were the predecessors of the Transcendentalist. If he is rejecting that, then he must mean something specific.

    Of course he’s rejecting that! He thinks the poem should resist intellect almost successfully. He seems to think poetry is the proper education about the true situation of man in the world, & its predicament. Our next podcast–now editing–is about 13 ways of looking at a blackbird. You’ll see there both how rationalistic he is in his puzzle-making, how subtle in the themes he broaches & the underlying motion of the action of the poem or suite, & how skeptical he is that rationality is as unimaginative as our scientific age inclines people to believe…

    Not that you couldn’t compare him to Emerson. He’s got nothing in common with the Romantic fantasy people often make of Emerson–but neither did the real Emerson.

    OK, I wait to understand what the imagination is for Stevens since he puts so much intellectual “capital” in it.  I have a request that at some point you do “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.”

    • #17
  18. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Titus Techera (View Comment):

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):

    Titus Techera (View Comment):
    The poem is serious about understanding human making in light of poetic making–as a striving for order.

    Yes!

    Maybe you are right & we disagree less than I thought. Maybe I’m just confused!

    It could be both of us!

    • #18
  19. Trink Coolidge
    Trink
    @Trink

    Thank you Titus and Langevine.  A cursory reading of this Wallace Stevens poem left me with little response but an unemotional shrug.   Your analysis was quite enlightening.  I fear I’m not as adept as you at patient re-readings and your nuanced analysis.   Truly brilliant.   And Titus, your melodic accent and voice lend a musical exoticism that I find helps me remain wide-eyed and listening during your explication.

    • #19
  20. Titus Techera Contributor
    Titus Techera
    @TitusTechera

    Trink (View Comment):
    Thank you Titus and Langevine. A cursory reading of this Wallace Stevens poem left me with little response but an unemotional shrug. Your analysis was quite enlightening. I fear I’m not as adept as you at patient re-readings and your nuanced analysis. Truly brilliant. And Titus, your melodic accent and voice lend a musical exoticism that I find helps me remain wide-eyed and listening during your explication.

    That’s so kind of you to say, Trink! I’m glad we could make Stevens a bit more appealing. He’s naturally quite unsentimental; & aloof. Has more diction than pathos; is ironic. It took some digging…

    • #20
  21. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Titus Techera (View Comment):
    He’s naturally quite unsentimental; & aloof.

    So, like a cat.

    I’m woefully allergic, but otherwise a sucker for felids. Is that why I’m a Wallace Stevens fan?

    • #21
  22. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    I wonder if it’s possible to work in insurance without being ironic?

    • #22
  23. Titus Techera Contributor
    Titus Techera
    @TitusTechera

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):
    I wonder if it’s possible to work in insurance without being ironic?

    Watch Double indemnity.

    Or The Truman Show, for that matter.

    • #23
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