"The Idea of Order at Key West" by Wallace Stevens

                Through my encounter of Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West” I discovered with each rereading the immense complexity of Stevens’ work.  I determined that the underlying theme of the poem is rooted to the notion of human imagination versus human reality that is illustrated through the narrators’ experience with the sound of the sea and a song of a woman.  Stevens’ opens the poem with “she sang beyond the genius of the sea” which implies the greater power of imagination over nature.  The author then continues on to examine the songs of the sea and the woman in detail by portraying them both as being “not a mask” (8) or in a fixed state but full of life.  Stevens’ progresses to convey the woman and the sea as two separate entities that are not of “medleyed sound” but coexist independently of one another.   However, this in turn initiates the realization that the woman’s voice has transformed the inhuman essence of the ocean into a human form through the narrator’s mind which allows him to experience an epiphany.  This is embodied in the significant line that “it was her voice that made the sky acutest at its vanishing” (34-35).  I believe that this line can be interpreted in countless ways with my key notion being that it is through the narrators’ human imagination that inhuman natural reality is intensified and accentuated into a stronger quintessence.  Stevens’ closes the poem illustrating the effects of the epiphany as the narrator ventures back into the civilization of town and grows frustrated with the impulse of human nature to place order onto the “words of the sea” (53).  This new enlightenment reiterates the theme of “The Idea of Order at Key West” of understanding the connection between reality and imagination or chaos and order. 

                From my own reflection of Wallace Stevens’ poem, I contemplated the significance of this theme.  To me, the struggle of distinguishing between imagination and reality has been a constant pursuit throughout human existence.  Countless individuals have meditated on the subject and have not succeeded at uncovering a concrete answer.  However, a definite answer may essentially be impossible to attain.  In “The Idea of Order at Key West” one could conclude that human imagination and human reality may in fact be in balance with one another through each individual’s mind.  Using this mind set, it can be interpreted that a person’s limitations are only set by one’s absence of imagination. “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand” (Einstein). However, I feel that as human's try to find order the balance of imagination and reality is altered and confusion constantly surrounds the question of how powerful the mind is in our perception of the world.    "And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgement which is my mind" (Meditations on First Philosophy, Descarte) implying the importance of the mind of the narrator to interpret the sound of the ocean and the woman.