Waldorf

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"The Waldorf" refers to the Waldorf Astoria hotel, which is an historic luxury hotel in New York City. Though originally housed near the Empire State Building, it now resides on Park Avenue, Manhattan. Famous for its Art Deco design, it was the first hotel to offer room service, a move which changed the course of the hospitality industry.
The Waldorf appears in Stevens' poem "Arrival at the Waldorf," where it represents "the wild country of the soul" (2), a place where reality and falsehood are intermingled and exchanged for one another, suggestive of the discursive condition evinced by poststructuralists. This exists in contrast to "Guatemala," which is "alien, point-blank, green and actual..." (15), suggesting that the unreality of modernity is countervailed by the solidity of Guatemala's naturalness.