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Abstract:

Using the example of a paradigmatic poem by W. Stevens, usually considered “modernist”, the question of what mimesis, the relationship between the creator and reality becomes in a non-classical culture — a culture of subjectivity that strives to express the inexpressible on purely individual grounds — is considered. The article is based on a “close reading” of Stevens’s poetic text, projected onto his creative path as a whole, the circumstances of his biography, the dynamics of artistic quests, intellectual demands, images of Florida, as well as on the philosophy of poetic creativity of the 1910–1930s, both in itself and in its contacts with romanticism and symbolism. Offering new resources for a deeper understanding of “The Idea of Order at Key West”, the poetology of this poem (features of lyrical composition, lyrical subject, time and space, sound design of images, symbolism), its key details (“she”, “beyond the genius of the sea”, “Ramon Fernandez”, “keener sounds”), centonic originality (one or another reference to Pound, Eliot, Valery, Freud, Wordsworth, Yeats), the author of the article questions the stereotypical thesis that the poem glorifies a woman, who with her sensual singing on the ocean shore seems to structure the surrounding chaos, and reads the poem in favor of the lyrical subject, a man, a flaneur, an observer, who, as a kind of symbolist, insists on the objectivity of his poetic point of view, is involved in a dispute with a male opponent about the meaning of modern creativity, a complex process of self-reflection, insists on overcoming in poetry and his own poetic word everything “feminine”.