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Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.
The Wallace Stevens Journal has been published by the Wallace Stevens Society since 1979 [9] and its editor, John N. Serio, has collected some of the journal's essays in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens. An audiobook of his complete public domain poems was completed by Librivox in 2007.
The Idea of Order at Key West" is a poem written in 1934 by modernist poet Wallace Stevens. It is one of many poems included in his book, Ideas of Order. It was also included in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. [1]
These are poems predominantly from the first book of poems written by the American poet Wallace Stevens and first published in 1923. The second edition of the book was published a decade later. It is not a full list of his poems.
The literary scholar Beverly Maeder writing for the Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens speaks of the importance the author placed upon linguistic structure in many of his poems. In this instance, Stevens is experimenting with the application of the verb 'to be' in its many forms and conjugations throughout the 13 cantos of the poem.
Robert Buttel sees the poem as a specimen of Stevens' "grotesque strain" and wryly observes that "it would be difficult to find a more unique funeral procession in literature". [1] He credits William Carlos Williams for improving the line "Within our bellies, we her chariot." from the original "Within our bellies, as a chariot." [2]
The poem's message is fairly simple. Stevens believed that poetry and literature in general had the ability to excite and inspire. He believed that the imagination was an overlooked tool with the innate capability of distinguishing a mundane life (i.e. the lives of those who wore 'white night gowns' to bed) from an exciting and fulfilling one.
About this poem Stevens wrote that it was "simply an expression of paganism". [3] Helen Vendler in the Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens summarized the poem as Stevens's search for "a systematic truth that could replace the Christianity of his churchgoing childhood." For Vendler, the stratagem which Stevens employs in attempting to ...