As we briefly discussed in class, Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” is about the relationship between imagination and reality. The speaker, who is observing a seaside sunset, is captivated by something he detects that is beyond the scope of the ocean. He describes that ‘something’ as a song that is sung by an unknown female entity. It is clear that the song “she” sings is superior to that of the ocean’s song, as evidenced by the first line of the poem, “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” The speaker is intrigued by some quality in the female entity’s song that he cannot find in the sea, and although the sea and the song may on the surface appear to be one in the same, the song possesses something that the sea lacks. This concept is supported in the last line of the second stanza, which makes the distinction between the sea and “her” song: “But it was she and not the sea we heard.” It is here that Stevens is making a distinction between imagination and reality, as the sea is a symbol for reality while “she” stands for imagination. Stevens is not necessarily asserting that the concept of imagination is in all aspects superior to reality, but he is trying to convey the idea that in the pursuit of meaning and order, one’s imagination is perhaps more valuable than any reality. Thus, in order to discover “ourselves and our origins” (second to last line of the poem), we must look beyond a thin reality and enter the realm of our imaginations.
That a greater sense of understanding and order will come from considering the imagination is an interesting suggestion, as the concept of imagination is more often associated with fantasy than with truth. But with further consideration, Stevens’ idea begins to make sense. The reality that we as humans perceive is one of apparent randomness. Sure, there are aspects of our reality that do seem orderly and predictable (such as the laws of physics), but there are many more events, circumstances, and facets of the real word that have no understood meaning or order. One of the only realms in which humans can exhibit control of their world is in the imagination, and out of this control can come a cerebral order of things. Just as “She was the single artificer of the world/ In which she sang,” (lines 17-18 of stanza 4), our world can be what our imagination constructs if we allow the imagination greater reign. And this complete application of the human imagination to intellectual discovery is perhaps the only way we will ever discover our own order.
