“Arrival at the Waldorf”: Living Between Imagination and Reality

In his essay “Imagination as Value”, Wallace Stevens presents a philosophy which guides us in the reading of his poetry. The poet puts forth the idea that “(T)he truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them." This imagination is not merely a realm of fantasy or escape, but rather a perspective and mindset that is ever present and gives meaning to the reality of the world in which we live. Imagination for Stevens is one of the great human powers, even genius, because it allows us the freedom of mind “to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.” According to Stevens, the closest we get to imagination is arts and letters, and as a poet, he engages in this pursuit which he compares to sensory activity in which the mind has the power to consider all possibilities of basic images and emotions.

In Steven’s opinion, imagination “…enables us to live our own lives. (W)e have it because we do not have enough without it.” Through the arts man reaches the pinnacle of imagination and in so doing helps to create reality. In this sense, imagination and reality are connected, as we live in the mind that creates beauty, justice, and happiness until reason may ultimately adopt them as reality and normality. Reality is the result of the imagination’s efforts to shape our world, a perpetual activity in which man attempts to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world around him. As such, Stevens labels reason as “the methodizer of the imagination” in which the latter is organized by and becomes reality.

A special quality of imagination is that it allows us to look both forwards and backwards, using different powers of the mind in each direction. In looking ahead to the future, to imagine what might be or what we would want to happen, one uses creative energy with the hopes of fulfilling expectations or dreams to form a physical reality. In looking back to the past, to remember what we already experienced or what already happened, one uses reproductive power with the hopes of refreshing memories of a physical reality that are now only present in our imagination. This latter use of imagination is the one employed in Steven’s poem “Arrival at the Waldorf.”

In the poem’s first line, the dichotomy between imagination and reality is established immediately. The narrator has already returned from “actual” Guatemala, the place that is real for him, faraway and “alien”, existing in the physical and “green.” In both its foreign and natural state, Guatemala appeals greatly to the speaker. Now, however, “back at the Waldorf”, the physical reality of Guatemala is what is alien to him and revisited only in his imagination. With “all approaches gone, being completely there,” he cannot return to Guatemala and has indeed fully returned physically if not mentally to New York City. The narrator will use the force of his imagination to recreate the natural life, green lushness, and people of that tropical setting in contrast to the artificial one at the hotel.

In his new reality he senses the “wild country of the soul” found at the hotel. The Waldorf is not one’s home, perhaps rendering him like a lost soul, a poor substitute for the place where one feels like he belongs. Stevens uses the word “wild” three times in the first six lines of his poem, and in each the connotation is of a negative nature, implying that the speaker is unhappy with the present reality of his world. He writes “(W)here the wild poem is a substitute/” For the woman one loves or ought to love,…” and “(O)ne wild rhapsody a fake for another.” Instead of the strong physical and emotional sense implied of loving a woman as he did or perhaps saw others do in Guatemala, at the Waldorf there is only the artificial and inadequate verse of the poem or song one might hum with the orchestra to take its place. Neither the words of the poem nor the music of the rhapsody evokes the mood or sensual feeling that was left behind in Guatemala. Upon his arrival back at the hotel, the speaker remarks about the distance he feels from his surroundings and the people therein. “You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight/ Or sunlight…”, from a great distance, looking at them but not feeling their intimacy. In this reality there is only verse, words that do not connect people for “men (are) remoter than mountains…” and “(W)omen invisible in music and motion and color.” After having experienced the reality of Guatemala, all other realities pale in comparison for the speaker.

As America’s greatest poet of the imagination, Wallace Stevens portrays a speaker in this poem who finds himself in the intersection of reality and imagination. Only through the artifice of imagination will he be able to filter and influence the reality in which he now lives, thereby making it more palatable an experience in the present and more potent a memory from the past.