Hello and welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Wallace Stevens, who lived from 1879 to 1955. He was a modernist poet. He was educated at Harvard in the New York Law School, and he spent most of his

life working in insurance in Connecticut. In an anthology called The Best Poems of the English

Language, which was selected and edited by Harold Bloom, Bloom refers to Wallace Stevens as

the principal American poet since Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, considering

him of even greater stature than Robert Frost, for example. He won the Pulitzer Prize in

1955 for his collected poems. Interestingly, when he was a younger man after college, he actually

did not produce much poetry.

At least he didn't publish much poetry in that time, instead focusing on his career and on his marriage.

But he came back to it much later when he was in his mid-30s with a collection with a poem called Sunday Morning.

And that was in 1915.

Today's poem, the idea of order at Key West, comes from 1934, and was published in a collection

called Ideas of Order, as well as in his collection, the collected poems of Wallace Stevens,

the one that won the Pulitzer Prize.

This is a very difficult poem to interpret, and so I'm going to avoid doing so, but I am going

to go ahead and read it.

It's a little bit long, so I may only read it once.

We'll see how it goes. The idea of order at Key West by Wallace Stevens.

She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice like a body

holy 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 variable ocean.

...