The Idea of Order at Key West Summary & Analysis
by Wallace Stevens

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"The Idea of Order at Key West" is one of modernist poet Wallace Stevens's most celebrated works. Written in 1934 and published in his 1936 collection Ideas of Order, the blank verse poem explores the power of art and imagination as well as humanity's relationship with the natural world. The speaker describes the captivating song of a woman walking along a beach in Key West, Florida. Her singing is so impressive that, according to the speaker, it upstages the beautiful natural scene behind her. In her solitary artistry, in fact, she seems to be the god-like maker "of the world / In which she sang." And when her song ends, the surrounding scene strikes the speaker as both more coherently "Arrang[ed]" and more "enchanting." The poem reflects on artists' "rage to order" the chaotic world around them—and suggests that art can make profound sense of its audience's world as well.

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