WALLACE STEVENS' CARIBBEAN DREAM 135

 There is a debate as to whether the woman represents reality, or is a cipher
for Stevens' own imagination.53 Blessing has found a predecessor in Tennyson's
mad "Maud," (56). An analogy not made before is to William Carlos Williams'
mother, a native of Mayaguiz, Puerto Rico. Stevens wrote the preface to William
Carlos Williams' Collected Poems 1921-1931 in the same year he wrote this
poem. He said, "Take the first poem, 'All the Fancy Things.' What gives this
its distinction is the image of the woman, once a girl in Puerto Rico in the old
Spanish days, now solitary and growing old, not knowing what to do with
herself, remembering. Of course, this is romantic in the accepted sense."54
The poem seems to have been generating within him for a long time, because
one of his earliest, in the Harvard Advocate of July 1899, reads like this:

 I strode along my beaches like a sea,
 The sand before me stretching firm and fair
 No inland darkness cast its shadow there
 And my long step was gloriously free.
 The careless wind was happy company
 That hurried past and did not question where.
 Yet as I moved I felt a deep despair
 And wonder of the thoughts that came to me.
 For to my face the deep wind brought the scent
 Of flowers I could not see upon the strand;55

 The sense of foreboding in "Ideas of Order" has been usefully explained
by James Longenbach in "The Idea of Disorder at Key West."56 The poem
was first published in October 1934. In September 1933, Fulgencio Batista
installed a military dictatorship when the Cuban economy was on the verge
of collapse. The Platt Amendment to the Cuban constitution allowed the
United States to intervene. President Roosevelt refused, but sent twenty-
nine ships to Cuban waters. Stevens wrote to his wife on February 23, 1934:

 The boat for Havana was tied up there waiting for the arrival of the train
 and I poked around all over here...Owing to the disturbed conditions in
 Cuba there have been warships in port here for a good many months. At
 the moment, the Wyoming is lying at anchor out near the Casa Marina. The
 men from this great vessel and from others that are in the basin at the Navy
 Yard come on shore in large numbers and from about four o'clock until all
 hours of the night they are walking up and down the streets. In Florida they

53 Barbara M. Fisher, "A Woman with the Hair of a Pythoness," Wallace Stevens and
the Feminine, ed. Melita Schaum, 54.
54 Opus Posthumous, ed. Milton J. Bates (London: Faber &Faber, 1957, rpt. 1989) 213.
55 Buttel 12.
55 Buttel 12.
5 Raritan 11.1 (Summer 1991): 92-114.