ABSTRACT
It appears natural to interpret Stevens’ first collection of the 1930’s in terms of what has often been understood as the fundamental endeavor of his project, memorably-if ambiguously-expressed in “The Idea of Order at Key West”: to give coherence to the threatening flux of contradictory modern experience, and provide consolations of aesthetic wholeness. Crucially, “The Idea of Order” imagined this external chaos in terms of nature, rather than, as in “Mozart, 1935” of society. While a ‘naturalization’ of modernity has ‘already’ taken place, as it were, ‘outside’ or ‘before’ the metaphoric staging of “The Idea of Order,” “Mozart, 1935” acted out this ethically difficult procedure in its metaphors and rhythms, with a degree of explicitness which by
itself implied that the sound of printed words and human otherness may be contrary, mutually exclusive, even inimical. In “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz” (CP 121-2), its protagonist “Hoon,” who in Harmonium had “found all form and order in solitude” (CP 65) now gloomily discovers that his forms “have vanished.” This feeling is closely related to the notion that the “shapes” he had dealt with in creative solitude had not been “the figures of men,” whereas now, in a world of “sudden mobs of men” and “sudden clouds of faces and arms,” “there is order in neither sea nor sun.”
