Distancing And Undistancing The Ideas Of Man - 1473 Words

Distancing and Undistancing: The Ideas of Man and the Idea of God in Wallace Stevens The practice of poetry is the practice of understanding the abstract qualities of reality. Wallace Stevens, one of most appreciated poets of the twentieth century, uses the medium in an effort to discover a sense of order in the disorder of daily life. He focuses on the distinction between the visible and the abstract invisible, and, as can be seen in his poems â€Å"The Idea of Order at Key West† and â€Å"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,† finds a gap existing between the creator and the created. This is a gap that can only be witnessed alongside, and in contrast to, the various—both natural and constructed—objects on earth, which can only be contemplated through the facets of human consciousness, such as imagination, and the means of artistic expression. These contemplations, however, form an even deeper divide, as man becomes creator in his ability, through imagination, to form order in a naturally order-less reality. The title, â€Å"The Idea of Order at Key West,† offers—in terms transparent only once the poem has been read through—a concise summary, somewhere between blatant and interpretable, of what follows: that â€Å"Order,† in a location that creates a strict divide between expansive nature and small-scale society, is more an â€Å"Idea† (read: human conjecture) than an element of truth or certainty. Here lies the theme, but the imagery in the poem is far more concrete. An anonymous â€Å"she†