Wallace Stevens Imagination

Wallace Stevens’s poetry often examines the relationship between reality and imagination, and its connection to the creation of art. In “The Idea of Order at Key West”, this relationship is explored through the character of the artist, in this case the woman singing, and her connection to the source of her inspiration — the sea, while exploring how the art she creates can change one’s view of reality. It is suggested that art has the ability to permanently change the way people perceive reality, and creates a new version of reality, individual to the artist. In the poem, Stevens uses sea as an influence of the artist’s creation, creating a juxtaposition between the artist and the inspiration. The relationship of the artist to the source of

In the first stanza, “she” is introduced as the artist in the poem, singing “beyond the genius of the sea” (1). In this sense, genius refers to spirit or inspiration, which represents the internal soul of the place where the singing woman gets her stimulation for her song. Stevens describes the sea as being “like a body wholly body” (3), meaning that, in a sense, it is incomplete, just like a body without a soul is perceived as incomplete. However, with art, the creator of the song is able to breach “beyond” the sea, to something more than the place itself, and access the spirit, or “genius”, of the sea. The sea is also described as an element which “made constant cry, caused constantly a cry” (5), both at the same time. The sea is making a sound through its spirit, but the sound is also caused by the sea being placed in the natural world, suggesting that the reality and imagination get influenced by one another. Still, the sea is more or less static, and it is the singer who takes up the function of the creator of art. Stevens’s essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” focuses on the function of the poet as an artist and creator within poetry, which he claims is the role of transferring his imagination to the reader: “[The poet’s] function is to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only

The juxtaposition of “the sea” and “she” is really emphasized by the two simple sentences in one line: “The sea was not a mask. No more was she” (8). That gives a very clear distinction between the two crucial elements of the poem; both are present and true, but both are separate and represent different versions of reality. Despite being distinguished by only one letter in the visual representations, these elements are indeed perceived differently: The sea is “not a mask”, it is simply a clear embodiment of the natural world, while not trying to embody anything else, and she, despite being connected to imagination, reflects the real world. Furthermore, there is a focus on the sounds produced by the two main components of the poem — the woman’s song and the sound of the water. Again, in spite of the song being inspired by the sound of the sea, there is a clear separation of these two sounds: “Even if what she sang is what she heard” (10), her song and the sound of the sea are different, just like the inspiration and the art are different. Despite the water and the wind being personified by the “stirring” and “gasping” (12-13), the speaker of the poem is listening to the song, not the sounds of the water — he is being drawn to the art, not the inspiration. The emphasis on sound in these lines is reinforced by the rhyming