Maybe he's right, but it's preachy. Dull. Admits no response apart from agreement or rejection. Not for me. Bronx cheer.

Bill, thanks for that and for the link. I’m pleased to see the reference to Zarathustra, which has come to my mind several times regarding WS. What strikes me about the poem is (again) how easy it is to read also in relation to writing poetry, to WS’s aesthetic philosophy.

Allen, I may have to start a thread on Whitman this Spring when I’m back with my books. I place him with Miss Emily and Melville on the central pedestal of American literature. I positively adore those lines...

I think no Stevens thread would be complete without “The Idea of Order at Key West”, one of his later poems and IMHO one of the more clear and engaging developments of his ‘creed’. There is very much I like in it, even if I can’t quite bring myself to join the church.


The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
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.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That 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, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

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. 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.

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,
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.

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.

I think there's plenty of room for rumination in the poem.

I at first took it as a nod to evolutionary theory, what with "blind" - in which case "bungling" would be apt. Then as a reference to the Prime Mover, or the God of deism. It could even refer to Spinoza's conception of God.

The "Hi!" is a fantastic way to start a poem. Does anyone think it's anything similar to the opening ejaculation of Beowulf?

(Excuse my filthy talk.)

"I mentioned deism only because it seemed relevant to the poem Rogerbob posted, and (I thought) to your comment about a god's (or a belief system's) usefulness. I'm not a deist myself, but deism was definitely significant in New England, and Stevens came from an old New England family."

Julie, Stevens's immediate forbears were from Pennsylvania. He got interested in his family backgrounds late in life, so there may have been a New England connection generations back. Stevens grew up in the Dutch Reformed church.

I have read this thread infrequently. Has Santayana been mentioned? And through Santayana, Lucretius? It's always seemed to me that Stevens's philosophy begins and ends in aesthetics. If it is a philosophy, it's predominantly a personal one--a single artist's way of confronting the world, a church of one.

Funny you should mention Santayana, since I almost mentioned him while I was mentioning Spinoza.

Santayana is a good catch, Sam. I haven't read The Sense of Beauty, so I leave it to others to draw out the parallels and echoes.

Wrt "the church of one", I substantially agree. I brought up WS's tendency to solipsism earlier in the thread. 'Reality' is not infinitely malleable by human consciousness, I don't think. WS sometimes writes as if it were. And, not to get too deep into the philosophical woods, but I characterized Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence as 'silly' earlier in the thread; I have deleted that adjective because it's not silly when you look at how it functions in N's philosophy: it's connected to amor fati, or love of fate. I think there is something similar going on in WS -- I mean the act of will.

My knowledge of philosophy is so spotty that I probably shouldn't even be commenting here. However, I have been reading Stevens, without much help from critics, for a long time. American lyric poets, at least early on, had a special relationship to Nature, simply because there was so much nature to write about. It starts with Freneau ("The Wild Honey-Suckle"), informs much of Bryant ("The Yellow Violet," "To the Fringed Gentian"), and runs through Emerson ("The Rhodora"). These "flower poems" are unique to American poets; the Brits might look at a bunch of daffodils but not at the individual flowers in the way that a naturalist would. That tradition runs through Williams ("Queen Anne's Lace") down to Wilbur ("On Misidentifying a Wildflower"). You could add a few things by Frost, Swenson, Bishop, and Oliver to the mix. These poems generally combine sharp observation and description with some kind of moral imperative; Wilbur called his own area "Mr. Bryant's homiletic woods."

Stevens doesn't seem especially interested in the details of nature "red in tooth and claw" or otherwise. "The Snow Man" is about an aesthetic object (if it's really about a snowman); "Bantams in Pine Woods" is about selectively bred fighting cocks with wonderfully evocative names. In these, the hand of man has "shaped" nature. "The Idea of Order at Key West" could have been written at any seaside place, though it happened to take place in Florida. The "natural" things in it are not very specific--sea, land, and sky, but the woman's song makes them "synch," binding them together in an aesthetic act, an epiphany, if you will, not for the singer but for the hearer(s) of the song.

For my money, "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" is one of his best; it's not just speculation, it's rhetoric--language shaped into effective argument. It's also a very funny poem if you get the joke. Too many of Stevens's poems seem to be private jokes, to be "got" by the poet alone; this one isn't.

Stevens came of age in a time when philosophy was in unusual ferment. Determinism (aided by science), pragmatism, and Nietzsche were in the mix, to which you could add modernist aesthetics. He was a young man from the "sticks" at Harvard and was doubtless impressionable and impressed. One can never quite account for how and why and where the aesthetic sensibility arises (Reading, PA?), but it does in these "pure products of America," roughly a one-in-a-million shot, I'd say. Who'd have thought that the invention that changed and still changes world history would have issued from a bicycle shop in Dayton, OH?

William, thanks for the praise of my website. It's very hard, given my expansive nature, for me to not ramble on and on and spray every hydrant on Eratosphere, but that website shows me trying to be minimal. Thanks again. A lot of Stevens to me is very flat, even doctrinaire. Just my grumpiness.

For my money, "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" is one of his best; it's not just speculation, it's rhetoric--language shaped into effective argument. It's also a very funny poem if you get the joke. Too many of Stevens's poems seem to be private jokes, to be "got" by the poet alone; this one isn't.

ITA on "A High-Toned...".

Also, re: the private jokes: IMHO -- just my opinion, offered as such -- too many of WS's poems are about poetry. That's a temptation for us all, but most poets I consider superior to WS, e.g., Dickinson, Whitman, Frost, Szymborska, Auden... resisted it. That's my personal aesthetic!

[edited in: To Aaron, below: so we need threads on Whitman and Auden! Something to look forward to...?]

One day someone will explain to me what there is to enjoy in Auden. (There are a few I enjoy. But reading his selected poems was a pretty dull trudge for me.)