The Man with the Blue Guitar

[Virgil]

Quasimodo and I are up for discussing Wallace Stevens's poem "The Man with the Blue Guitar." It's a rather long poem and unfortunately you can't get the whole thing off the internet since it's copyright has not expired yet. But we'll try to supplement with quotes when we can. The poem divides into 32 sections. I'm not sure whether there is a natural order to the sections. I think most of the poem works in a theme and variations form from classical music, if you are familiar with that. It's a really enjoyable read, not one of those dense Stevens poems that scare many. I think in this poem Stevens is capturing the music of the English language, or perhaps more accurately the American version of the English language, since Stevens was very conscious of the distinctions. Would love to see others participate. :)

First, the poem is actually inspired by Pablo Picasso's painting by the same name.

http://www.clevelandart.org/exhibcef/picassoas/illusmag/Old_Guitarist.jpg

So the poem is reflecting on the painting and then also speaking from the painting. Here are the first four sections of the poem open for discussion.


I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero'd head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

III

Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,

To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang it from a savage blue,
Jangling the metal of the strings…

IV

So that's life, then: things are they are?
It picks its way on the blue guitar.

A million people on one string?
And all their manner in the thing,

And all their manner, right and wrong,
And all their manner, weak and strong?

The feelings crazily, craftily call,
Like a buzzing of flies in autumn air,

And that's life, then: things as they are,
This buzzing of the blue guitar.

[quasimodo1]

For Stevens, especially in this poem, imagination and reality are inextricably linked. The constant refrain in Blue Guitar is "things as they are". In Stevens' own words about some parts of this poem... "This group deals with the incessant conjunctions between things as they are and things imagined. Although the blue guitar is a symbol of the imagination, it is used more often simply as reference to the individuality of the poet, meaning to the poet any man of imagination."

[JBI]

Long poem :) - lets see if I can dig it up online, because I don't have a copy of Stevens (unfortunately) on me. I may post a little on it later, but I'm hoping to get some stuff on Avison down on the discussion thread.

The poem is very Walt Whitmanny, in many ways. Notably with all the repetition of grammar and sound, and in playing with the transformative spirit through the artwork.

The color blue though, what should we make of it? I'm of the mind that it gestures both to Picasso, but at the same time, to the subconscious. I think, by the Guitar being blue, Stevens is suggesting that there is an under layer within the artwork itself, imbued with a subconscious, transformative quality, that, using the instrument as a metaphor for the poem, changes all the listeners.

Quasi though, I don't think I can particularly agree with your summary of the guitar as the capturing of the poet, I think Stevens seperates the poem from the poet; the guitar, not the poet is blue - it doesn't gesture to Stevens, as Wordsworth would have gestured to himself; instead, the poem is the colorful, and the poet is the gray, the bland.

In that sense, this stanza:




The vivid, florid, turgid sky,
The drenching thunder rolling by,

The morning deluged still by night,
The clouds tumultuously bright

And the feeling heavy in cold chords
Struggling toward impassioned choirs,

Crying among the clouds, enraged
By gold antagonists in air--

I know my lazy, leaden twang
Is like the reason in a storm;

And yet it brings the storm to bear.
I twang it out and leave it there.


is made to be all the more profound: it is not the poet, but the poem which is the storm, the guitar has all the power, as it captures everything around it in a torrent of blue, yet the artist, Stevens, the guitar player, is absent, or



Is a form, described but difficult,
And I am merely a shadow hunched

Above the arrowy, still string,
The maker of a thing yet to be made;

The color like a thought that grows
Out of a mood, the tragic robe

Of the actor, half his gesture, half
His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk

Sodden with his melancholy words,
The weather of his stage, himself.

[Virgil]

For Stevens, especially in this poem, imagination and reality are inextricably linked. The constant refrain in Blue Guitar is "things as they are". In Stevens' own words about some parts of this poem... "This group deals with the incessant conjunctions between things as they are and things imagined. Although the blue guitar is a symbol of the imagination, it is used more often simply as reference to the individuality of the poet, meaning to the poet any man of imagination."
Thanks for that Stevens' quote. It does put the poem into perspective.


Long poem :) - lets see if I can dig it up online, because I don't have a copy of Stevens (unfortunately) on me. I may post a little on it later, but I'm hoping to get some stuff on Avison down on the discussion thread.
If you do, please let me know about it. I couldn't find it.

[JBI]

Thanks for that Stevens' quote. It does put the poem into perspective.


If you do, please let me know about it. I couldn't find it.

http://www.geegaw.com/stories/the_man_with_the_blue_guitar.shtml

[Virgil]

http://www.geegaw.com/stories/the_man_with_the_blue_guitar.shtml

Holy smoke you did it!! Four bananas for you. :banana::banana::banana::banana:

[quasimodo1]

I have misplaced the attribution of this quote but it helps in getting an overview of Blue Guitar... "The Man with the Blue Guitar is a serial poem by Wallace Stevens. Its subject is the subject of much of Stevens'

work: Creativity, specifically Poetic Creativity.
To many this may seem an esoteric topic, and worth little consideration. An impractical pursuit, worthy only of

wastrels, or those too cowardly to face the world. Yet, Wallace Stevens rose to senior positions in an insurance

company--no small task for a wastrel, or coward. And to great accolades for both his poetry, and his thought.

He was a man to whom questions of creativity were not limited to the abstract, nor to some small part of his life--it

dominated all his life. The whole of harmonium was the goal he set for his work. This he never realized, never could

realize. It could only ever be a work in progress.

The Man with the Blue Guitar can be considered notes he set down, notes to himself, that he shares with us, on his

lifelong inquiry. They are composed in a kind of shorthand, that of a great intellect, and a great sensitive to the

world in which "The blue guitar/And I are one."

[Virgil]

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."
There's a few things I see in the first stanza that seems to carry through the poem. First there the couplets that rhyme and those that don't. Second there are the lines that lyrically flow and the lines that don't. Look at that first opening couplet. It's quite unususal when you compare it with the other couplets:

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

No end rhyme, no flowing lyricism. Two end stops in the second line.

It seems to me that when the words are describing objective reality, the lyricism stops. It seems to me, and I haven't read the poem through so I may change my mind later, that when Stevens is in a realism mode, the poeticism rings discordant, and when he's in the subjective mode of the imagination, the lines ring with concordance.

Third, interesting the very first color mentioned is not blue, but green. What does it mean for a day to be green? If the guitar is blue, and that stands for imagination, what does green stand for? I think we'll have to come to some sort of conclusion on the color scheme. Colors in Stevens tend to confuse me. I wonder how consistent he is with them.

Fourth, what a term for a guitar player, "shearsman." That's not even a craftsman. Intuitively one makes the anaology of an artist to a craftsman, a pottery maker, a gilded plate maker, a jewelry maker, something of high craft. A shearesman is raw cutting, just hand function, not even really requiring any level of skill. This is the hardest of reality, the bottom of a skilled hierarchy.

Fifth, there is the dichotomy of the "they" and the man playing the guitar, which in essence is a triangle when you consider the narrative voice. They is a communal group, he an individual, and the poet's voice a omniscient presence. The three create an interesting tension, and really brings out the relationship of art from all perspectives. The tension is brought out immediately when the community voice ("they") complain that what comes from the guitar is not what they see:

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

Sixth, there are the aspects of what art is. Is it a reflection of reality, or a new alternative reality? What the community asks for is something that they can understand, something that resonates to their vision of reality:

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

[Il Penseroso]

Fifth, there is the dichotomy of the "they" and the man playing the guitar, which in essence is a triangle when you consider the narrative voice. They is a communal group, he an individual, and the poet's voice a omniscient presence. The three create an interesting tension, and really brings out the relationship of art from all perspectives. The tension is brought out immediately when the community voice ("they") complain that what comes from the guitar is not what they see:

Sixth, there are the aspects of what art is. Is it a reflection of reality, or a new alternative reality? What the community asks for is something that they can understand, something that resonates to their vision of reality:



It's been awhile since I've read this, but I remember these themes Virgil brings up (particularly the tension between audience and artist) as key, and confusing, particularly as the poem develops and the character voices (which in the first section are separated from the "inner voice" of the poet by quotation marks) become less easily identifiable (or impossible to distinguish).

The line "The day was green" I think is also interesting, as Virgil mentions. I think the obvious correlation to nature here isn't too far off, as the audience folk appear remarkably ill-adapted in their conceptions of the natural world (they wish for a flattened earth).

I'll try to give it a reread and come back with more detailed impressions.

[Quark]

Quasimodo and I are up for discussing Wallace Stevens's poem "The Man with the Blue Guitar."

Good idea, Virgil. It's a poem worth discussing, but has the conversation fizzled?

[Virgil]

Good idea, Virgil. It's a poem worth discussing, but has the conversation fizzled?

No, I'll continue tonight. I guess Quasi hasn't been around lately.

[Quark]

No, I'll continue tonight.

Oh, good news. I'll go to the library and get the poems. Wait:



http://www.geegaw.com/stories/the_man_with_the_blue_guitar.shtml

JBI is always one step ahead.

[mortalterror]

That was an interesting poem, and not at all tedious. But I'm more interested in Steven's as an example of the late bloomer than as an artist. We have many enfant terrible's but few masters who take up the pen late in life. I believe Bloom once compared him to Sophocles in this respect.

I was just looking over his biography, and apparently he quarreled with both Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway: two authors I have a tremendous respect for. I know that it is popular to compare the nature of Steven's work with T.S. Eliot's but beyond the surface difficulties I see little similarity. I'm not sure that I'd even place him in the category of major poets despite his jars, blackbirds, and icecreams. He has not the immediacy of say Baudelaire, or even the shocking novelty of Rimbaud. He's obscure without being intellectual; so I wouldn't put him in the same class as Petrarch. His work is not imitative like Dante or Ovid's. Stevens reminds me of Ferlinghetti more than he does other powerhouses of the twentieth century such as Pessoa or Rilke. That said, I'd have no trouble placing him in the middle of the pack with the likes of William Carlos Williams and E.E. Cummings.

[Virgil]

I'm sorry Mortal, you obviously don't understand Stevens. Bloom puts him at the top 20th century American poet, ahead of Eliot and Pound and all the modernists.

[mortalterror]

I'm sorry Mortal, you obviously don't understand Stevens. Bloom puts him at the top 20th century American poet, ahead of Eliot and Pound and all the modernists.

Yes, well...Bloom says a lot of things. The old wax monument's been wrong so many times it doesn't serve to count them anymore. It probably doesn't hurt that he knew Stevens and liked him at a time when he was very young and susceptible to such influences. Bloom mentions several places that Stevens is his favorite writer and how are we supposed to be objective about our champions? Besides, Bloom is an ambassador of a certain kind of academic view. Once you know his biases, stances, and leanings, how fond he is of Whitman for instance; his preferment of Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens seems only natural, if somewhat less credible.

[JBI]

I'd put him up there. Virtually every American poet since him either copies him, or copies William Carlos Williams. Harmonium though, really needs to be read as a single poem, in the sense that Herbert's The Temple needs to be read whole. Generally, he introduced a sort of abstraction to English poetic conceits, where mundane objects are used as figurative symbols for philosophical insights - something which hasn't really faded from our poetic consciousness. Of course, many people dislike him, and I would say I dislike Bloom's interpretation of him (as I dislike the bulk of Bloom's interpretations, since he is such a tedious self-promoting blab who can only rant instead of criticize) but even so, when he established Stevens as a central American poet, he was right in the sense that he has been the most enduring influence on American poetry, far more so than even Eliot or Frost.

As for his poetry not being deep or anything, well, the Emperor of Ice Cream seems like a silly poem at first, but ultimately, once you realize it is about a dead woman who wasted her life, it unwinds and becomes far more profound. That really sits nicely in a series of poems, which really culminates in Sunday Morning. Ultimately though, his unconventional use of images and ideas are what has endured.

Lets be honest - I don't think audiences today are as captivated by Eliot style poetics (and he is a favorite of mine, so don't think I am Eliot bashing). Pound seems to have gone out of fashion, and Eliot's Unreal City seems less relevant and interesting, as the Wars and Post-War periods have come and gone, and the so called Unreal City has become a commonplace vision, rather than a vision built on a shifting cultural consciousness. Stevens though, seems to have fared better - his stylistics have been profoundly influential, to the point where you can hear him talking behind most of the "Academic" American poets of today, and most of the other ones as well.

Ashbery, Ammons, Hollander, Merril, Strand, etc. all are products of Stevens' concept of poetry. I don't think American verse has created a new concept of poetry outside of Stevens' thought since his death - all the new styles merely seem to echo his voice, which in itself echoes Whitman's voice. What he merely did was take Whitman, remove the "Self" from the equation, and the personal, and changed that to the abstract.

Like I said before, the only other voice I tend to really hear in American poetics is William Carlos Williams. Frost seems to have found a disciple in Wilbur, Eliot mostly in British verse, notably Geoffry Hill, but in terms of American voices, Stevens' seems to sound the loudest.

[Jozanny]

http://www.geegaw.com/stories/the_man_with_the_blue_guitar.shtml

Cool, maybe I can join in later if I make my deadline. Thanks JBI.

[PrinceMyshkin]

Something that struck me in the 1st 4 parts is an undertone of possible contempt or condescension in the phrase "things as they are." It may be taken at first to be a neutral, objective reference to what's out there (Das ding an zich?) but with every repetition it comes more and more to feel like a dismissal of the apparent and of those who demand to be presented with things "exactly as they are" implying, I infer, that imagined reality is as or even more 'real' than things as they (apparently) are.

[Virgil]

Something that struck me in the 1st 4 parts is an undertone of possible contempt or condescension in the phrase "things as they are." It may be taken at first to be a neutral, objective reference to what's out there (Das ding an zich?) but with every repetition it comes more and more to feel like a dismissal of the apparent and of those who demand to be presented with things "exactly as they are" implying, I infer, that imagined reality is as or even more 'real' than things as they (apparently) are.

Good point point Prince. I agree it's not neutral and I agree it's toward the negative side, but I do think "contempt" might be a little strong. If there is a word that connotes in between, perhaps that word wold be most accurate, at least to my reading.

[PrinceMyshkin]

Good point point Prince. I agree it's not neutral and I agree it's toward the negative side, but I do think "contempt" might be a little strong. If there is a word that connotes in between, perhaps that word wold be most accurate, at least to my reading.

Point taken. I withdraw "contempt" in favour of condescension, skepticism. or mild disdain.

[Virgil]

Point taken. I withdraw "contempt" in favour of condescension, skepticism. or mild disdain.

Yes! One of those is perfect. Not sure which one, but it's in those options. :)

[Quark]

Some really good posts started the discussion off. There's a lot of substance to them, so it's going to take me a while to work my way through it all.


The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

No end rhyme, no flowing lyricism. Two end stops in the second line.

It seems to me that when the words are describing objective reality, the lyricism stops. It seems to me, and I haven't read the poem through so I may change my mind later, that when Stevens is in a realism mode, the poeticism rings discordant, and when he's in the subjective mode of the imagination, the lines ring with concordance.

Yeah, reality and imagination are two important, and antagonistic, ideas in the poem. They may be the most important. From the very beginning Stevens is worried that the blue guitar can only portray the world imaginatively, and that listeners too absorbed by the music might mistake his playing for reality. The first fourteen stanza raise the oft-struck Platonic alarm that poetry is a dangerous teacher. After that, though, the poem gives a much more even-handed treatment. As the poem becomes less concerned with society, and more personal, the speaker acknowledges that both reality and imagination, sun and moon, the lion of "lute" and the lion "locked in stone" are necessary. If it's true that the imagination is too factitious, it's also true that reality is too foreign and unfeeling. One risks silence and oblivion in the face of nature, just as they might risk self-deception in the face of art. The end of the poem appears to be a negotiation of these two ideas--maybe even a combination. In any case, I think they're important to the poem.

I don't know if I agree with you about how they're handled technically, though. You're reading of those first few lines is good, but I think it runs into problems later on. VII is particularly problematic. There, we have a similar cadence in the opening lines:


It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.

The first line about the sun--an ally of the day and reality--is described in an uninterrupted line just as I, 1. Meanwhile, the moon--imagination's symbol--arrives in two choppy sentences. The second sentences of both stanzas share that harsh staccato sound, too. VII inverts I, though, and uses smoothness when talking about reality. Further on, XVI-XIX will return to this debate between fiction and reality, but the verse is pretty similar when either idea is brought up. I think the lyricism--if we're using the term in the usual sense when it's mentioned like this: a certain sweetness of sound and a tempo that carries the reader along--of this poem is a little too varied to lay out in a few sentences. It's used for many different things.


Third, interesting the very first color mentioned is not blue, but green. What does it mean for a day to be green? If the guitar is blue, and that stands for imagination, what does green stand for?

I assumed that green and blue were representative of different domains. The blue is the space created by the guitar, and the green is the green of landscape. The green represents the day-to-day life as it passes undisturbed by art. The blue represents, well, it's pretty obvious.


I think we'll have to come to some sort of conclusion on the color scheme.

You make it sound like we're painting a room.


Colors in Stevens tend to confuse me. I wonder how consistent he is with them.

Everything is confusing in a Stevens poem. I was actually surprised at the first four stanzas of this poem. They are some of the most straight-forward I've ever seen from him. When the poem gets going in the middle, though, Stevens doesn't let me down. It's back to his usual baffling stuff.


Fourth, what a term for a guitar player, "shearsman." That's not even a craftsman. Intuitively one makes the anaology of an artist to a craftsman, a pottery maker, a gilded plate maker, a jewelry maker, something of high craft. A shearesman is raw cutting, just hand function, not even really requiring any level of skill. This is the hardest of reality, the bottom of a skilled hierarchy.

Good observation. I was pretty thrown by that title, too. Shearsman?


The poem is very Walt Whitmanny, in many ways. Notably with all the repetition of grammar and sound, and in playing with the transformative spirit through the artwork.

The comparison certainly holds, and it even explains a few things. I wonder what you think of the grass in this poem.


The color blue though, what should we make of it? I'm of the mind that it gestures both to Picasso, but at the same time, to the subconscious.

While the blue guitar is connected with the night and dreams in some places, I think he's referring to something broader than just the subconscious. It sounds likes he's talking about ever consciousness. The blue guitar is humanity, mind, intellect, feeling. The blue seems to be attached to the subconscious, as well, but I don't think it's specifically an instrument of subconscious.


I think, by the Guitar being blue, Stevens is suggesting that there is an under layer within the artwork itself, imbued with a subconscious transformative quality, that, using the instrument as a metaphor for the poem, changes all the listeners.

It isn't so much of transformation, though, as it is replacement. The audience has their own perceptions and identities replaced by art. V says "Ourselves in poetry must take their place," and X says "Slowly the ivy on the stones becomes the stone." Art pushes aside genuine observation and experience (the stone itself) and replaces it with a pleasant fiction. This is the danger of art that the first fourteen stanzas of the poem are so concerned with.


Quasi though, I don't think I can particularly agree with your summary of the guitar as the capturing of the poet, I think Stevens seperates the poem from the poet; the guitar, not the poet is blue - it doesn't gesture to Stevens, as Wordsworth would have gestured to himself; instead, the poem is the colorful, and the poet is the gray, the bland.

In that sense, this stanza:

Agreed, and that's a good analysis of VIII.


Okay, there's a start. I still have to get to Il Penseroso's post and the stuff on Stevens as a poet.

[Virgil]

Yeah, reality and imagination are two important, and antagonistic, ideas in the poem. They may be the most important. From the very beginning Stevens is worried that the blue guitar can only portray the world imaginatively, and that listeners too absorbed by the music might mistake his playing for reality. The first fourteen stanza raise the oft-struck Platonic alarm that poetry is a dangerous teacher.
I don't really think the poem is dealing with the platonic notion of art. I think it's much more copmplex than that. What Stevens is saying is that the artisitic priniciple in man (the blue guitar being a metaphor) is what creates the world. Let's move to stanzas V and VI:


V

Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry,
Of the torches wisping in the underground,

Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light.
There are no shadows in our sun,

Day is desire and night is sleep.
There are no shadows anywhere.

The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows. Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar.

VI

A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

Ourselves in the tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place

Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them, on the blue guitar,

Placed so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;

For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when

The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.

In stanza five Stevens (and I think it's the narrator speaking here) establishes what a world without the creative impulse is like: A sort of dark underground, unlit, an earth flat and bare, an empty heaven. In in six, the tune is something beyond, and in the tune we are fixed in space by the guitar and so percieve beyond to a thinking of a "god". Here the religious motif first comes in, that is that only through our artistic priciple can we conceptualize a transcendence. [A little background of Steven's religion. Early in life he was definitely an atheists/agnostic but one can see a growing incorporation of a religious conception in his later poetry and supposedly, though I don't think it was confirmed, he converted to Roman Catholicism on his death bed a few days before he died. He had been struggling with cancer.]


After that, though, the poem gives a much more even-handed treatment. As the poem becomes less concerned with society, and more personal, the speaker acknowledges that both reality and imagination, sun and moon, the lion of "lute" and the lion "locked in stone" are necessary.
As I'm reading this more carefully, I have to take back what I said that the stanzas are a sort of theme and variation. No, not at all. I think there is a strong line of development that runs from beginning to end. That satnza with the lion and the lute was absolutely incredible, one of the best pieces of poetic writing I have ever seen. I'll get to it eventually.


If it's true that the imagination is too factitious, it's also true that reality is too foreign and unfeeling. One risks silence and oblivion in the face of nature, just as they might risk self-deception in the face of art. The end of the poem appears to be a negotiation of these two ideas--maybe even a combination. In any case, I think they're important to the poem.


I don't know if I agree with you about how they're handled technically, though. You're reading of those first few lines is good, but I think it runs into problems later on. VII is particularly problematic. There, we have a similar cadence in the opening lines:
You may be right. I think I was to hasty in my conceptualizing of the poem above. I think it's way more complex.


The first line about the sun--an ally of the day and reality--is described in an uninterrupted line just as I, 1. Meanwhile, the moon--imagination's symbol--arrives in two choppy sentences. The second sentences of both stanzas share that harsh staccato sound, too. VII inverts I, though, and uses smoothness when talking about reality. Further on, XVI-XIX will return to this debate between fiction and reality, but the verse is pretty similar when either idea is brought up. I think the lyricism--if we're using the term in the usual sense when it's mentioned like this: a certain sweetness of sound and a tempo that carries the reader along--of this poem is a little too varied to lay out in a few sentences. It's used for many different things.
I agree with you here. I had not really absorbed thge poem fully when I made that statement. Sorry.


I assumed that green and blue were representative of different domains. The blue is the space created by the guitar, and the green is the green of landscape. The green represents the day-to-day life as it passes undisturbed by art. The blue represents, well, it's pretty obvious.
You're on the ball, Quarky. I agree.

[Quark]

I'm going to respond with a lot of questions here. I kind of want to feel people out (inappropriate as that sounds) as to where they're at before I really launch into what I think about this poem. I'm not even sure what to say. The thing about reality and imagination sounded good, so I'll stick to that for now.


I don't really think the poem is dealing with the platonic notion of art.

Wait, you don't think it's doing that at all? Sure, the speaker affirms the importance of art in the end, but don't you think there's some indictment of it in these first stanzas? Stevens portrays artists as crudely mangling whatever they try to represent in II, and VI is about the timelessness of art--even though Stevens goes on to suggest that timelessness is impossible. X is about people losing themselves in art. It seems like Stevens is building a case against poetry--one that I called Platonic (perhaps incorrectly, although I think it holds).


What Stevens is saying is that the artisitic priniciple in man (the blue guitar being a metaphor) is what creates the world. Let's move to stanzas V and VI:

Are you taking stanza V as Stevens talking? I tend to see those lines as meaning the opposite of what they say. When it's said that "There are no shadows anywhere" or "There are no shadows in our sun" it sounds like Stevens is trying to plant some doubt in the reader's mind. Why would the speaker say there are no shadows when no one brought up shadows? Why would he repeat the lines? Why would he insert the "for us" in the line "The earth, for us, is flat and bare?" Later in the poem we'll see that shadows are a problem, and that the world has mountains. The "us" in this stanza want a flat and shadowless world, yes, but that doesn't mean that's the way the world actually is. Is that what you were going for, though? I don't know if I understood what you were saying.


In stanza five Stevens (and I think it's the narrator speaking here) establishes what a world without the creative impulse is like: A sort of dark underground, unlit, an earth flat and bare, an empty heaven. In in six, the tune is something beyond, and in the tune we are fixed in space by the guitar and so percieve beyond to a thinking of a "god". Here the religious motif first comes in, that is that only through our artistic priciple can we conceptualize a transcendence.

True, but don't you think that the poem points to some problems with the creative impulse. What do you make of a stanza like X?


[A little background of Steven's religion. Early in life he was definitely an atheists/agnostic but one can see a growing incorporation of a religious conception in his later poetry and supposedly, though I don't think it was confirmed, he converted to Roman Catholicism on his death bed a few days before he died. He had been struggling with cancer.]

I didn't know he had a brush with Catholicism. Do you see his life as a straight line from atheism to the church, though?


I think there is a strong line of development that runs from beginning to end.

I think so to, but it's a bit like In Memoriam in the sense that the progression is rather mysterious. You can tell that the speaker is in a different place at the end of the poem from where they started it, but you don't know how they got there. Why did they progress? How did they overcome the difficulties that were plaguing them at the beginning?


You're on the ball, Quarky.

Quarky? And I try so hard to get people to take me seriously.

[PrinceMyshkin]

A poem should not mean
but be

Archibald Macleish, "Ars Poetica"

I apologize if this derails the discussion, but I feel somewhat as if we're being the guy behind Humpty Dumpty, about to nudge him off the wall.

Of course most of us have had the experience of shaking our heads in bewilderment or frustration at some poem that seemed to be beyond us and we may have longed for interpretation, but it might be better to think Too bad I didn't get it than to get someone elses interpretation, however much sense it makes? And indeed even if you 'get' no more than a glimmer, an intuition, on your own, mightn't that affect you more deeply than to get however well-reasoned an explanation?

For me Wallace Stevens has always offered both his singular music and his sometimes very free-form metaphysics; and when I can't follow the latter, I'm nonetheless grateful for the former.

[JBI]

A poem should not mean
but be

Archibald Macleish, "Ars Poetica"

I apologize if this derails the discussion, but I feel somewhat as if we're being the guy behind Humpty Dumpty, about to nudge him off the wall.

Of course most of us have had the experience of shaking our heads in bewilderment or frustration at some poem that seemed to be beyond us and we may have longed for interpretation, but it might be better to think Too bad I didn't get it than to get someone elses interpretation, however much sense it makes? And indeed even if you 'get' no more than a glimmer, an intuition, on your own, mightn't that affect you more deeply than to get however well-reasoned an explanation?

For me Wallace Stevens has always offered both his singular music and his sometimes very free-form metaphysics; and when I can't follow the latter, I'm nonetheless grateful for the former.

Meh, as for the Macleish quote, as Al Purdy put it, "I think that's a load of crap; a poem should do both if it's any good." This whole "Be" over mean is really silly, if the poem is meaningless, it is meaningless, and therefore valueless. Stevens though, you really need to read for what he is saying. In a sense he is difficult, especially in the later works, but this poem isn't all that challenging at a base level - it is long, and quite like a Bartok Concerto in terms of content, but it still isn't that inaccessible. In order to experience Stevens, I think you need to try and understand what he is trying to mean. His early works too, like Sunday Morning, are long, often drawn out metaphysical episodes with strong argument and philosophical weight. The reason we read, I would wager, is not for that glimmer, but to try and get the whole thing - to capture the whole poem. With some, it is perhaps easier, with others, like The Wasteland, perhaps more difficult, with this one, I think you just need to work piece by piece with lots of notes in the margin, and then compare each piece - the length makes it difficult, as well as the relation between pieces, but ultimately the goal is to surround the poem, and understand not what it means, but "How it means."

[Quark]

I feel somewhat as if we're being the guy behind Humpty Dumpty, about to nudge him off the wall.

I hate when I have that feeling.


Of course most of us have had the experience of shaking our heads in bewilderment or frustration at some poem that seemed to be beyond us and we may have longed for interpretation, but it might be better to think Too bad I didn't get it than to get someone elses interpretation, however much sense it makes? And indeed even if you 'get' no more than a glimmer, an intuition, on your own, mightn't that affect you more deeply than to get however well-reasoned an explanation?

Well I do hope that no one feels coerced into accepting an interpretation they don't really believe. I would agree that your own confusion is better than a reading that you don't have any sympathy for. That would defeat the purpose of reading the poem. I don't think anyone is doing that, though. When people share their thoughts on a poem's meaning rarely will they just completely and unquestioningly latch onto someone else's interpretation. People are just not that simple. Usually, we compare what's said with our own observations and ask ourselves whether what's been suggested adds in any way. Sometimes we just accept part of someone's idea, or we change it in some way to fit our own reading.


http://mywabashvalley.com/media/jpg/derail04.jpg
Always a danger

You're right that literary discussion isn't about finding the simplest explanation for a work, and that the experience of reading and our impressions from the work are important in themselves. I don't see, though, why one has to limit themselves to only talking about their vague impression and the sound of the words. Those are certainly part of the poem, but there's far more. I think this poem calls for a deeper discussion. At times, Stevens like to toy with reader seeking meaning, as he says in stanza XXIV of this poem, but to shut that part of our mind down completely would be a mistake.

I was going to add to my post something about why Stevens' poetry particularly calls for a discussion of meaning, but JBI already covered it apparently. I guess that was a bit of a one-two punch.

[Virgil]

Wait, you don't think it's doing that at all? Sure, the speaker affirms the importance of art in the end, but don't you think there's some indictment of it in these first stanzas? Stevens portrays artists as crudely mangling whatever they try to represent in II, and VI is about the timelessness of art--even though Stevens goes on to suggest that timelessness is impossible. X is about people losing themselves in art. It seems like Stevens is building a case against poetry--one that I called Platonic (perhaps incorrectly, although I think it holds).

Indictment? No, absolutely not. You're going to have to quote the poem, because I see anything about a case against poetry. If anything Stevens is saying that without art life is purely brutish and empty:

The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows. Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,
It is through poetry that the world takes flesh and is more than mere objects. Read stanza XI:


XI

Slowly the ivy on the stones
Becomes the stones. Women become

The cities, children become the fields
And men in waves become the sea.

It is the chord that falsifies.
The sea returns upon the men,

The fields entrap the children, brick
Is a weed and all the flies are caught,

Wingless and withered, but living alive.
The discord merely magnified.

Deeper within the belly's dark
Of time, time grows upon the rock.
Yes the chord "falsifies" but without the chord is nothing; it is through the prism of metaphor that life gains relationship and three dimensionality.


Are you taking stanza V as Stevens talking? I tend to see those lines as meaning the opposite of what they say. When it's said that "There are no shadows anywhere" or "There are no shadows in our sun" it sounds like Stevens is trying to plant some doubt in the reader's mind.
I think it is the community talking in V. I read the shadows as part of the imagining recreated world. The community is talking about a world without shadows, pure blunt reality, without poetry. The voice seems to be saying, "don't talk to me about the greatness of poetry because all I've got is hard bright reality."


Why would the speaker say there are no shadows when no one brought up shadows? Why would he repeat the lines? Why would he insert the "for us" in the line "The earth, for us, is flat and bare?" Later in the poem we'll see that shadows are a problem, and that the world has mountains. The "us" in this stanza want a flat and shadowless world, yes, but that doesn't mean that's the way the world actually is. Is that what you were going for, though? I don't know if I understood what you were saying.
I think that's what Stevens is saying, that the reality of the world is flat and shadowless. Poetry gives it hue.


True, but don't you think that the poem points to some problems with the creative impulse. What do you make of a stanza like X?
Ten is a wonderful stanza and deserves posting:


X

Raise reddest columns. Toll a bell
And clap the hollows full of tin.

Throw papers in the streets, the wills
Of the dead, majestic in their seals.

And the beautiful trombones -- behold
The approach of him whom none believes,

Whom all believe that all believe,
A pagan in a varnished car.

Roll a drum upon the blue guitar.
Lean from the steeple. Cry aloud,

"Here am I, my adversary, that
Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones,

Yet with a petty misery
At heart, a petty misery,

Ever the prelude to your end,
The touch that topples men and rock."
Ten is a stanza in a series of stanzas, eight through fourteen, where music creates a rich world around them. Yes this is the creative impulse and Stevens leads into the religion issue here, implying I think that religion is part of the creative impulse, counter to the empty, raw reality.


I didn't know he had a brush with Catholicism. Do you see his life as a straight line from atheism to the church, though?
I am not a Stevens scholar. I have not even read a biography. I don't know what to make of his religion. As I read the poems you can see even here there is a religious speculation, but one can read in Man with the Blue Guitar as an atheistic reality against a self created diety. But as one reads the later poems, I see the imagination as a channel to the diety, which is quite different. I don't know how else to read "Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour," which is one of my favorite Stevens poems: http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/wallace_stevens/poems/18031. Stevens's daughter disputes the death bed conversion, but here's a letter by the priest who he supposedly converted to, written over twenty years later to a Stevens scholar : http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Stevens/conversion.html. The letter seems quite credible to me.


I think so to, but it's a bit like In Memoriam in the sense that the progression is rather mysterious. You can tell that the speaker is in a different place at the end of the poem from where they started it, but you don't know how they got there. Why did they progress? How did they overcome the difficulties that were plaguing them at the beginning?
I agree, this poem does remind me of In Memoriam in the way it goes from idea to idea but yet carrying a developmental thrust.


Quarky? And I try so hard to get people to take me seriously.
:lol: I do take you seriously. That was a term of endearment and affection. :D

[Jozanny]

Virgil, I can't discuss BG yet, but after we met I did a bit of Google, and I have to say, Stevens deathbed conversion seems really weird, or incongruous, if you like. I can see it for someone like me. I went from wanting to be a Catholic theologian to a hedonist/atheist and now just can't stand any of it, but I can see myself accepting the sacraments just in case, like Pascal--but Stevens just doesn't square with the traditions of RC authoritarianism. Maybe it was his last joke?

[Quark]

Indictment? No, absolutely not. You're going to have to quote the poem

The quotation you came up with is actually the best example of this:


XI

Slowly the ivy on the stones
Becomes the stones. Women become

The cities, children become the fields
And men in waves become the sea.

It is the chord that falsifies.
The sea returns upon the men,

The fields entrap the children, brick
Is a weed and all the flies are caught,

Wingless and withered, but living alive.
The discord merely magnified.

Deeper within the belly's dark
Of time, time grows upon the rock.

To me, these lines are not so much celebrating art's three-dimensionality as they are alerting us that art can be deceptive and potentially harmful. Ivy, which is clearly not stone, becomes stone. Children, who are maybe loosely associated with fields, become fields. This part of the poem isn't too worrisome, but with the line "It is the chord that falsifies" the stanza becomes much more critical. When the fiction of the analogies is revealed, people realize that they are trapped by art and forced to assume roles that don't cohere with their lives: "The fields entrap the children, brick/ Is a weed and all the flies are caught,/ Wingless and withered, but living alive." "Entrapment" and "caught" conjure up feelings of imprisonment, and "weed" and "flies" point to stagnation. This doesn't sound too laudable. Then the speaker says "The discord merely magnifies." Well that's not good. Stanza XI does appear to attach some unsettling ideas to art. There are others, too, in the beginning of the poem that approach art rather critically. III might be another. There, artistry is associated with violence and distortion.


If anything Stevens is saying that without art life is purely brutish and empty

I agree. Reality without art is shown to be empty and brutish, but art isn't just some solvent that will get rid of emptiness and brutishness. It comes with a whole host of side-effects. It also has its limitations. I think the early stanzas look into those effects and limitations.


I think it is the community talking in V. I read the shadows as part of the imagining recreated world. The community is talking about a world without shadows, pure blunt reality, without poetry. The voice seems to be saying, "don't talk to me about the greatness of poetry because all I've got is hard bright reality."

I think that's what Stevens is saying, that the reality of the world is flat and shadowless. Poetry gives it hue.

XXI brings a lot of the same imagery back up, and I think I misread that stanza (believe me, it's easy to do). I then transposed that misreading on top of V. When I look back over the poem, I tend to think you're right about the shadows.


Ten is a wonderful stanza and deserves posting:

Oh, my mistake. I meant XI, actually. X is neither here nor there--a rather odd stanza, if you ask me. It doesn't seem to have much to do with anything.


I am not a Stevens scholar.

And neither am I. Twentieth century poetry is definitely not my thing, but I do enjoy something different now and then.


but one can read in Man with the Blue Guitar as an atheistic reality against a self created diety. But as one reads the later poems, I see the imagination as a channel to the diety, which is quite different.

I could see that.


Oh, and Jozanny posted something right before my post, so don't overlook that.

[Virgil]

Virgil, I can't discuss BG yet, but after we met I did a bit of Google, and I have to say, Stevens deathbed conversion seems really weird, or incongruous, if you like. I can see it for someone like me. I went from wanting to be a Catholic theologian to a hedonist/atheist and now just can't stand any of it, but I can see myself accepting the sacraments just in case, like Pascal--but Stevens just doesn't square with the traditions of RC authoritarianism. Maybe it was his last joke?
Well, any death bed conversion may seem weird. It is something that is surely an about face to some degree. Though I have said that Stevens' attitude to God and the hereafter seems to alter toward his later poems. Perhaps not completely unexpected.

Not sure what you mean by Catholic authoritarianism. Do you mean a hierachal structure of ecclisiastics? I don't see Catholicism any more authoritarian than most other Christian denominations, except of course the very liberal ones that just ask you to do as you feel. To some degree the fundementalist belief in a pure literal intgerpretation of the Bible, which is not the Catholic position, is much more authorian if you ask me. But that's just my opinion.

I can't possibly know what attracted Stevens to Catholicism but most people who convert over seem to be attracted to the sacrements. Let me venture to say that the notion of the sacrements is not incongruopus with Steven's later notion of God and divinity. If God can be reached through channeling the imagination, then what are the sacrements but a process of reaching communion with God through an agreed to notion. Take the notion of the body of Christ, the Holy Communion. Through the process of consecration, a unleaven piece of bread is transformed into the body of Christ, a process called transubstantiation. It is not symbolically the body of Christ, it is the body of Christ. Sure materially the wafer is bread, but spiritually it is the body of Christ in a metaphysical way. That transubstantiation is an agreed to notion and it requires both the priest at one end and the reciever at the other to accept the miracle. If the reciever is not a believer, then it is nothing. If the reciever is a believer and when the priest says "body of Christ" and the reciever says "amen" then the host becomes Christ's physical being, spiritually of course. That is an act of channeling God through the imagination.

The same would hold for the other sacrements.

I don't know whether this was what Stevens was thinking, but it is quite possibe.

[quasimodo1]

Wallace Stevens



from Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose
from The Man With The Blue Guitar

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR VII (manuscript version)

The day is green and the wind is young.
The world is young and I play my guitar.

The skeletons sit on the wall. They drop
Red mango peels and I play my guitar.

The gate is not jasper. It is not bone.
It is mud, and mud baked long in the sun,

An eighteenth century fern or two
And the dewiest beads of insipid fruit

And honey from thorns and I play my guitar.
The negress with laundry passes me by.

The boatman goes humming. He smokes a cigar
And I play my guitar. The vines have grown wild.

The oranges glitter as part of the sky.
A tiara from Cohen's, this summer sea.

(from the revised edition of Opus Posthumous)

[quasimodo1]

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from The Man With The Blue Guitar

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR IX (manuscript version)

A letter for the ignorant
The dithering goes on. I read.

"The myths in which we recognize
Ourselves, incessantly revealed,

Keep us concealed." Things as they are
Stand jabbering. But to catch the word,

To know completely we have heard,
To pick it on the blue guitar--

I read. "The subject of poetry
Is poetry, things as they are."

We hear them on the blue guitar
The poet picks them as they are,

But picks them on the blue guitar,
A guitar that makes things as they are.

(from the revised edition of Opus Posthumous)

[Quark]

It's been awhile since I've read this, but I remember these themes Virgil brings up (particularly the tension between audience and artist) as key, and confusing, particularly as the poem develops and the character voices (which in the first section are separated from the "inner voice" of the poet by quotation marks) become less easily identifiable (or impossible to distinguish).

Yeah, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell who is talking. Usually, Stevens will use pronouns like "my" and "our to distinguish between speakers (as the plural has to refer to the crowd since there's only one blue guitar in the poem), but there isn't always an indication like that. Eventually this gets easier as the poet in "The Blue Guitar" simply stops talking to the crowd. The later stanza are much more introspective and don't interact with an imagined audience. The difficulty of these later stanzas is less about who is talking and more about who is being talked to. Sometimes the speaker merely talks to him or herself in an almost lyric absorption, but in other places the speaker reaches out to readers.


THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR VII (manuscript version)

That's interesting, quasi. Are we looking at an entirely different version of the poem, or just some spare stanzas that didn't make the cut?

[quasimodo1]

Stevens, in his notes, has alternate versions of stanzas 7, 9, 10, 11 and 21. Some of this material is recycled into parts of OWL'S CLOVER.

[quasimodo1]

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from The Man With The Blue Guitar

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR XV

Is this picture of Picasso's, this "hoard
Of destructions", a picture of ourselves,

Now, an image of our society?
Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,

Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,
Without seeing the harvest or the moon?

Things as they are have been destroyed.
Have I? Am I a man that is dead

At a table on which the food is cold?
Is my thought a memory, not alive?

Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?

XVI. The earth is not earth but a stone,
Not the mother that held men as they fell

But stone, but like a stone, no: not
The mother, but an oppressor, but like

An oppressor that grudges them their death,
As it grudges the living that they live.

To live in war, to live at war,
To chop the sullen psaltery,

To improve the sewers in Jerusalem,
To electrify the nimbuses--

Place honey on the altars and die,
You lovers that are bitter at heart.

{notes}: 141.23-24 "hoard / Of destructions" / Cf. Christian Zervos' "Conversation with Picasso" (Cahiers d'art, vol. X, 1935) in which Picasso is quoted as saying that in the past, pictures were completed in stages and were a sum of additions, but that in his case "a picture is a sum of destructions. I make a picture-- then I destroy it. In the end, though, nothing is lost: the red I removed from one place turns up somewhere else." Cf. also THE NECESSARY ANGEL, page 741. 15-17

[Quark]

Quasi, are these supposed to line up with the stanzas that were later published? That is, does the alternate version marked VII align with the stanza, canto, or whatever-you-want-to-call-it VII in the later, published version? XV certainly does, but others not so much. The alternate IX looks more like XXII or XXIV than it does IX. The sentence "The subject of poetry/Is poetry" is close to "Poetry is the subject of the poem" from XXII, and the phrase "A letter for the ignorant" reminds me of "A poem like a missal" from XXIV. Perhaps Stevens imagined a different progression early on, but changed the order later to what we see now.

In any case, I think the final XXII and XXIV fit the poem much better than the alternate IX. All of them make rather similar statements, but the alternate IX doesn't read right. I mean it doesn't sound like the rest of the poem. It lacks the repetition of the other stanzas (or whatevers):


XXII

Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and

To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is

An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.

But are these separate? Is it
An absence for the poem, which acquires

Poem, issues, returns, between, and absence all said and then echoed. In XXIV this is even more apparent as almost every word is repeated. Really, "The Man with the Blue Guitar" knows about as many words as a three year old, but it fills out 33 whatevers by reusing language again and again. Stevens appears to use repetition to show change, and make the poem feel more dynamic. Most of the poem is made up of declarative sentences which have an air of finality about them, but by repeating words and attaching different ideas to them on each repetition Stevens avoids finalizing a thought. In XXIV, the poem is compared to "missal found/ In the mud," but it quickly becomes a "missal for that young man." That young man is then turned into a "scholar" looking for a "book," which in turn becomes a "phrase" pursued by a "hawk of life" and then by just the "hawk's eye." This kind of movement from one thing to another appears to be important thematically, as well. In XXVII, the poem describes the futile effort to hold things in one shape. The geographers and philosopher try to describe things in a permanent, concrete way, but the sea changes and eludes them. Stevens seems to be embracing change and movement in the language of the poem. The alternate versions, though, don't have that same repetition and transformation that we see in the rest of the poem.

[Petrarch's Love]

Hi all. Just poking my head in again after a rather extended absence from these forums. But who could resist a discussion of this marvelous poem? I've only read this poem very casually once or perhaps twice, so I'll need to give it a close read over before coming up with any especially deep comments. I've also only had a chance to skim over the responses on the thread, so apologies in advance if I inadvertently repeat ground you've already covered. That said, there were a couple initial thoughts based on what you seemed to be going over in the first ten stanzas or so:


The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

First as to Virgil's initial question about why the day is green. Others in this thread have suggested what I think is the clearest reading, that green represents everyday reality in contrast to the "imagination" represented by the blue guitar. I wanted to highlight this, though because it looked as though no one had explicitly brought up the style of Picasso's art as an important aspect of this poetic response to it. I'm guessing this poem was written in a time when cubism, surrealism, and abstract art were being considered novel, groundbreaking, and potentially baffling. Thus it seems to me that an initial gloss of these lines would be as a reaction to non-traditional art. The day, as a matter of fact, was green, so why is he painting it blue? That's not the way it is. As an additional layer of meaning I wonder about "green" as a connotation of the conventional pastoral, especially since he evokes the "shearsman." Is this a poet moving away from acting as conservative shepherd to the avant-garde artist shearing the sheep? (Incidentally, I also very much agree with Virgil's reading of the shearsman as both distinctly manual labor and lower class. In this sense he is very much aligned with the real, the tactile and it is interesting that this would be the individual who holds the blue guitar. This tension between artist and laborer is also at work in the painting, of course, which depicts a figure who is at once quotidian peasant laborer and Quixote).

Regardless of whether the pastoral enters into this or not, I think it's fairly safe to read the green as a natural color contrasted with the unnatural blue of the art (or more specifically the new art?), and this brings us to what everyone has identified as the key line of the poem "You do not play things as they are." In the first stanza, as I've suggested above, I think it could easily be read as a reaction of traditionalists to a non representative style of art. I wouldn't want to reduce this line to a single reading too quickly, however, since I think its meaning is varied and complex both here and throughout the poem. This exchange between Virg. and Prince Myshkin regarding this line caught my eye:




Something that struck me in the 1st 4 parts is an undertone of possible contempt or condescension in the phrase "things as they are." It may be taken at first to be a neutral, objective reference to what's out there (Das ding an zich?) but with every repetition it comes more and more to feel like a dismissal of the apparent and of those who demand to be presented with things "exactly as they are" implying, I infer, that imagined reality is as or even more 'real' than things as they (apparently) are.


Good point point Prince. I agree it's not neutral and I agree it's toward the negative side, but I do think "contempt" might be a little strong. If there is a word that connotes in between, perhaps that word wold be most accurate, at least to my reading

I think I would add to this list a sense of frustration or perhaps the better word would be anxiety on the part of the poet which gets attached to this phrase. Part of what "things as they are" is doing is suggesting the fine balance between the real and imagined that an artist must struggle with and the paradox of creating something real out of what is not real. It opens onto a whole tangle of questions about art and reality that crop up in various forms throughout the poem. Given that this phrase is putting a great deal of pressure on the place of art or perhaps even upon the validity of art, I think that part of the "negative" valence that both Virg. and Prince are sensing here is one of anxiety on the part of the artist as to whether art can live up to the things that are, whether art transcends the things that are, where art and reality must meet and where they must part company. I think that the line is left intentionally ambiguous, functioning as a question mark rather than a period in the poem. It could be read as a valid objection to art that is too far flown from reality to be meaningful, or it could be read as a statement that we are to react to with disdain, as an opinion so absurdly prosaic that it misses the point. I think the meaning wobbles throughout the poem, keeping the question of how to interpret it open and unstable.

As one last point, I had a rather different sense of stanza five than Virgil did. Virg read this:


In stanza five Stevens (and I think it's the narrator speaking here) establishes what a world without the creative impulse is like: A sort of dark underground, unlit, an earth flat and bare, an empty heaven. In in six, the tune is something beyond, and in the tune we are fixed in space by the guitar and so percieve beyond to a thinking of a "god". Here the religious motif first comes in, that is that only through our artistic priciple can we conceptualize a transcendence

I hadn't been thinking of this stanza in terms of a "world without the creative impulse." Or at least I'm not sure that the speakers are supposed to take on quite so negative a connotation as that summation suggests. I was vividly reminded of Plato's cave in this passage and read the "there are no shadows" motif in terms of that allegory. I was reading the speakers as those who do not live among shadows but see things clear by the true light of day, "there are no shadows in our sun." Regardless of possible Platonic allusions, it is clear that the notion of a world rooted in stark reality in this passage is filled with pure, untroubled, unshadowed light in addition to being "flat and bare." The shadows and the flickering lights, the shades and uncertainty are very markedly associated with poetry. Whether we are meant to sympathize with the unshadowed light or with the shades of poetry is, I think, ambiguous, but I think there is a question at work here about the darker side of poetry and illusion as well as the potential for a barren world without it.

That's it for now. I'll post again when I've had more time to spend with the poem and/or as the discussion progresses.

[Quark]

Hi all. Just poking my head in again after a rather extended absence from these forums.

Hi, Petrarch. How's your summer going?


Others in this thread have suggested what I think is the clearest reading, that green represents everyday reality in contrast to the "imagination" represented by the blue guitar. I wanted to highlight this, though because it looked as though no one had explicitly brought up the style of Picasso's art as an important aspect of this poetic response to it.

Thanks for bringing this up. It's a little difficult for me to talk about since I don't have much familiarity with surrealism, but one can still sense that there's an important tension between the works of the "new" art form and the ideals of the "old" one. I like the idea of the shearsman as an advant-garde shepherd, and the blue as a surrealist green. I still don't know what to make of the line "things as they are," though. It returns several times in the poem, and I wonder whether there isn't some change in the poet's attitude toward it as he gets farther into the subject.


I hadn't been thinking of this stanza in terms of a "world without the creative impulse." Or at least I'm not sure that the speakers are supposed to take on quite so negative a connotation as that summation suggests. I was vividly reminded of Plato's cave in this passage and read the "there are no shadows" motif in terms of that allegory. I was reading the speakers as those who do not live among shadows but see things clear by the true light of day, "there are no shadows in our sun." Regardless of possible Platonic allusions, it is clear that the notion of a world rooted in stark reality in this passage is filled with pure, untroubled, unshadowed light in addition to being "flat and bare." The shadows and the flickering lights, the shades and uncertainty are very markedly associated with poetry. Whether we are meant to sympathize with the unshadowed light or with the shades of poetry is, I think, ambiguous, but I think there is a question at work here about the darker side of poetry and illusion as well as the potential for a barren world without it.

I think that's true, but I would add that there's a third concept making its way onto the stage in V. As Virgil pointed out, religion is also being talked about here. Unlike in II, III, and IV where the speaker merely wonders about art and reality, the audience here demands something more than just creativity and truth. They want a replacement for "empty heaven and its hymns"--a poetry in which they can "take their place." These are spiritual and social needs that exist separately from truth and creativity. The guitarist's audience first claims that they no longer believe in the promises of Christian mythology. They don't want to hear about "the structure of vaults upon a point of light." This is an echo of the medieval belief in God as light and the church built upon that foundation. In Dante's Paradiso, for example, God appears in a vision as a single point of light, and the identification of divinity as light was a pretty well established one by this point. The line about "torches wisping in the underground" also has parallels to Dante and the belief that the deceased live on as flames in darkened cavities beneath the Earth's surface. In V, though, this is all called into question. The audience considers this an antiquated mythology. They are now in the light--perhaps of reason--and don't acknowledge the church or God. They call upon the poet to fill that place: "Poetry/ exceeding music must take the place/ Of empty heaven and its hymns." The commentary on art and reality continues in V, but religion enters into the discussion, as well.

It is odd, though, that Stevens uses the word poetry to denote both an old mythology and a new art form. It's "greatness of poetry" that the audience doesn't believe in at the beginning and it's "Poetry/ Exceeding music" that "must take the place" at the end--a rather contradictory message. It's as though someone were saying "Don't talk to me of the deliciousness of maple syrup, but doesn't it go great with pancakes?" Stevens might be indicating that the audience wants a poetry that stands by itself and not one that relies on gods and religion, but it's an odd way he puts it. I suppose it could be there to characterize the audience as confused and self-contradictory. The first section of the poem make them look similarly confused.

[Virgil]

Ah hell. I just had a long reply to Petrarch and the website/internet crashed when I hit submit and lost it all. :flare: Damn it!:flare:

[Petrarch's Love]

Hate when that happens!:crash: Now we'll all have to be in suspense whilst we await your further brilliant thoughts on the poem. :idea:

[Petrarch's Love]

Didn't get a chance to respond properly to Quark yesterday, but now I do.


Hi, Petrarch. How's your summer going?

Hi Quark. Summer really just started for me, since I was teaching until mid June. So far it's going splendidly. Hope you're doing well. :)




Thanks for bringing this up. It's a little difficult for me to talk about since I don't have much familiarity with surrealism, but one can still sense that there's an important tension between the works of the "new" art form and the ideals of the "old" one. I like the idea of the shearsman as an advant-garde shepherd, and the blue as a surrealist green. I still don't know what to make of the line "things as they are," though. It returns several times in the poem, and I wonder whether there isn't some change in the poet's attitude toward it as he gets farther into the subject.

Yes, I don't know if there's anything more specialized knowledge about surrealism could add to the understanding of the poem or not, but it seemed to me that it would be hard to discuss this poem fully without at least a fairly basic level consideration of the style of the painting, given that it was probably still pretty avant-garde when this was written. Wonder if St. Luke's with his strong artistic background would have anything to add on the subject.

I agree with you about the "things as they are" line. I think it takes on a lot of different meanings throughout the poem, and functions as a pivotal line throughout in the sense both of being important and of being the line in which the ideas and opinions expressed in the poem turn...and turn again. Certainly it's the kind of line that not only invites but insists upon more than one meaning.




I think that's true, but I would add that there's a third concept making its way onto the stage in V. As Virgil pointed out, religion is also being talked about here. Unlike in II, III, and IV where the speaker merely wonders about art and reality, the audience here demands something more than just creativity and truth. They want a replacement for "empty heaven and its hymns"--a poetry in which they can "take their place." These are spiritual and social needs that exist separately from truth and creativity. The guitarist's audience first claims that they no longer believe in the promises of Christian mythology. They don't want to hear about "the structure of vaults upon a point of light." This is an echo of the medieval belief in God as light and the church built upon that foundation. In Dante's Paradiso, for example, God appears in a vision as a single point of light, and the identification of divinity as light was a pretty well established one by this point. The line about "torches wisping in the underground" also has parallels to Dante and the belief that the deceased live on as flames in darkened cavities beneath the Earth's surface. In V, though, this is all called into question. The audience considers this an antiquated mythology. They are now in the light--perhaps of reason--and don't acknowledge the church or God. They call upon the poet to fill that place: "Poetry/ exceeding music must take the place/ Of empty heaven and its hymns." The commentary on art and reality continues in V, but religion enters into the discussion, as well.

It is odd, though, that Stevens uses the word poetry to denote both an old mythology and a new art form. It's "greatness of poetry" that the audience doesn't believe in at the beginning and it's "Poetry/ Exceeding music" that "must take the place" at the end--a rather contradictory message. It's as though someone were saying "Don't talk to me of the deliciousness of maple syrup, but doesn't it go great with pancakes?" Stevens might be indicating that the audience wants a poetry that stands by itself and not one that relies on gods and religion, but it's an odd way he puts it. I suppose it could be there to characterize the audience as confused and self-contradictory. The first section of the poem make them look similarly confused.

Oh, absolutely, religion is a huge topic across both stanzas 5 & 6. I agree that it's a confusing section with a lot of slippage that seems to lead to contradictions. I think it's possible to read it as you do, that the audience is confused and self-contradictory. However, I think you could also read them as confusing but not confused. I read them as presenting a radical overthrow of religion with poetry taking its place, and not just any poetry, but a particular sort of challenging, almost secular ascetic of poetry.

This goes back to what I was saying with regard to the "things as they are line" and the anxiety on the part of the poet I see building around that line. I think a very similar line is the one paired with the refrain that starts stanza 6: "A tune beyond us as we are/Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar." This is an even stronger statement of the paradoxical challenge this audience offers the poet/artist. He must make something that is both beyond the audience and is exactly what they are at the same time. It's a paradox of artistic creation that I imagine most people who have seriously tried to either create or study any kind of art have hit their heads against at one time or another. How do you transport people beyond themselves while still maintaining enough of reality, enough of humanity for people to see themselves and to connect with your work?

This artistic paradox is taken to a radically heretical level in these stanzas in which the kind of poetry demanded is one completely devoid of the old religious associations (I like the connection you make between the flames in the Divina Commedia and the "torches wisping underground). No longer is art a gothic structure composed upon a "point of light" (God?). Now it must instead reflect the light of reality itself. The challenge is now compounded for the poet. It is no longer how to bring people to God, how to create a balance in art between humanity and transcendence, but how to create transcendence in a world with an empty heaven in which nothing but the stark light of space and the temporal world are in evidence. The role of artistic creator and Creator are merging in these stanzas.

This said, I still think there's something, perhaps not contradictory, but troubled about the audience's desire to reject religion, to declare heaven and its hymns empty, and at the same time to try to fill that heaven with a poetry that will carry them to that heaven. They claim to live only for this place, yet they also want to be transported elsewhere. They only believe in themselves and their reality, yet they still yearn to be transported beyond themselves. They want something beyond, but nothing changed. Poetry is meant to fulfill this conflicting desire, not by showing how selves are reflected in the universe, but by providing a universe reflecting the self. Thus, I think that the opening lines to stanza six point, not only to an artistic but to a religious or spiritual paradox. At some points in the stanzas the stance of the speakers seems serious and well founded. They are creating a new type of poetry and of belief grounded in a logical, straightforward, daylit world. In other places their argument seems weaker. What to make, for example of the lines: "For a moment final, in the way/The thinking of art seems final when/The thinking of god is smoky dew." On the one hand this could be interpreted as praise for art, which is true and clear, while the thinking of god (with a telling lower case "g") is confused. On the other hand the line could also indicate a certain kind of ignorance, a recognition that attempting to understand the veiled, shadowy or smoky ways of god is simply much more difficult than grasping the finality, the cohesiveness of art. In any case, the nuance of both the language and the ideas in these stanzas and the way they convey these deep questions about, art, religion and the relation of one to the other, is simply fantastic.

As a parting thought, the word "space" is incredibly prominent in these lines and seems to shift in meaning, from an evocation of the heavens, to a more modern sense of outer space, to simply the air into which the music of the guitar is played.

[quasimodo1]

[This artistic paradox is taken to a radically heretical level in these stanzas in which the kind of poetry demanded is one completely devoid of the old religious associations (I like the connection you make between the flames in the Divina Commedia and the "torches wisping underground). No longer is art a gothic structure composed upon a "point of light" (God?). Now it must instead reflect the light of reality itself. The challenge is now compounded for the poet. It is no longer how to bring people to God, how to create a balance in art between humanity and transcendence, but how to create transcendence in a world with an empty heaven in which nothing but the stark light of space and the temporal world are in evidence.] Elegantly put Petrarch. Also to reply to Quark's question, the unpublished stanzas do not seem to me as if they would replace the published version, at least in the sense they would be sequential in a poem which is not meant to have a clear, logical or linear form. BLUE GUITAR in form is unlike most other Stevens's poems in that the stanzas are like poet's notes to himself. Stevens comments on OWL'S CLOVER "is to emphasize the opposition between things as they are and things imagined, in short, to isolate poetry." Stevens similarly remarks on BLUE GUITAR..."this group deals with the incessant conjunctions between things as they are and things imagined. Although the blue guitar is a symbol of the imagination, it is used most often simply as reference to the individuality of the poet..."

[Quark]

However, I think you could also read them as confusing but not confused.

Oh, no doubt. I was just commenting on what I thought was one of the difficulties of reading this section. The language is rather tangled, and words that mean something in the first line mean their opposite by the end of the stanza. In V, the word "poetry" goes through this kind of transformation. One could interpret this as either a characterization of the audience or as the poet sensing the latent problems in what the audience suggests. The latter is certainly true. A realistic (but simultaneously religious) poetry without mystification or god would be problematic. As you point out, the desire for poetry in which "nothing changed" conflicts with the call for "A tune beyond us as we are." Realism and transcendence are clearly at odds with each other, but the audience wants both together. More conflicting impulses can be seen in the qualification "for a moment final." The audience wants poetry to express an unchanging order that's "beyond the compass of change" and "in a final atmosphere," but they want it from something only momentary. I agree that the difficulty one might have with reading lines like "A tune beyond us as we are/Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar" is quite similar to the difficulty one might have when trying to write a poem with these lines in mind.

I had some questions about this part, though:

What to make, for example of the lines: "For a moment final, in the way/The thinking of art seems final when/The thinking of god is smoky dew." On the one hand this could be interpreted as praise for art, which is true and clear, while the thinking of god (with a telling lower case "g") is confused. On the other hand the line could also indicate a certain kind of ignorance, a recognition that attempting to understand the veiled, shadowy or smoky ways of god is simply much more difficult than grasping the finality, the cohesiveness of art.

How is the praise for poetry different from the attack on the audience's ignorance? It sounds like a different way of saying the same thing. If art is more "true and clear" than the thinking of god, then wouldn't it naturally follow that the thinking of god is "more difficult" to understand?


As a parting thought, the word "space" is incredibly prominent in these lines and seems to shift in meaning, from an evocation of the heavens, to a more modern sense of outer space, to simply the air into which the music of the guitar is played.

That's a good point. I'd have to go back and look at VI, but the way you have it written here makes it sound like the audience is pushing the word "space" toward the artist.

[Virgil]

I was so ticked off I lost what I wrote the that the other day here, I've not come back here. But I'm back. ;)


Hi all. Just poking my head in again after a rather extended absence from these forums. But who could resist a discussion of this marvelous poem?
I'm so happy you did Petrarch. It's always a pleasure to get your thoughts, on just about anything actually. :)


First as to Virgil's initial question about why the day is green. Others in this thread have suggested what I think is the clearest reading, that green represents everyday reality in contrast to the "imagination" represented by the blue guitar. I wanted to highlight this, though because it looked as though no one had explicitly brought up the style of Picasso's art as an important aspect of this poetic response to it. I'm guessing this poem was written in a time when cubism, surrealism, and abstract art were being considered novel, groundbreaking, and potentially baffling.
I think the poem was published in 1937 and probably written not too much prior. I think you are right about what green represents.


Thus it seems to me that an initial gloss of these lines would be as a reaction to non-traditional art. The day, as a matter of fact, was green, so why is he painting it blue? That's not the way it is. As an additional layer of meaning I wonder about "green" as a connotation of the conventional pastoral, especially since he evokes the "shearsman." Is this a poet moving away from acting as conservative shepherd to the avant-garde artist shearing the sheep? (Incidentally, I also very much agree with Virgil's reading of the shearsman as both distinctly manual labor and lower class. In this sense he is very much aligned with the real, the tactile and it is interesting that this would be the individual who holds the blue guitar. This tension between artist and laborer is also at work in the painting, of course, which depicts a figure who is at once quotidian peasant laborer and Quixote).
Interesting you say the guitar player. I guess he does look like a laborer. I never thought about that.


Regardless of whether the pastoral enters into this or not, I think it's fairly safe to read the green as a natural color contrasted with the unnatural blue of the art (or more specifically the new art?), and this brings us to what everyone has identified as the key line of the poem "You do not play things as they are." In the first stanza, as I've suggested above, I think it could easily be read as a reaction of traditionalists to a non representative style of art. I wouldn't want to reduce this line to a single reading too quickly, however, since I think its meaning is varied and complex both here and throughout the poem.
I'm not sure Stevens is commenting on abstract art so much. He may associate himself with it, but I think his general thrust is that the artist (abstract, traditional, whatever) creates the world around us and that the creative principal in all mankind dresses the world from the bare, raw basics of life. I might actually go so far as to say the artist codifies that collective imagination.


This exchange between Virg. and Prince Myshkin regarding this line caught my eye...

I think I would add to this list a sense of frustration or perhaps the better word would be anxiety on the part of the poet which gets attached to this phrase. Part of what "things as they are" is doing is suggesting the fine balance between the real and imagined that an artist must struggle with and the paradox of creating something real out of what is not real. It opens onto a whole tangle of questions about art and reality that crop up in various forms throughout the poem. Given that this phrase is putting a great deal of pressure on the place of art or perhaps even upon the validity of art, I think that part of the "negative" valence that both Virg. and Prince are sensing here is one of anxiety on the part of the artist as to whether art can live up to the things that are, whether art transcends the things that are, where art and reality must meet and where they must part company. I think that the line is left intentionally ambiguous, functioning as a question mark rather than a period in the poem. It could be read as a valid objection to art that is too far flown from reality to be meaningful, or it could be read as a statement that we are to react to with disdain, as an opinion so absurdly prosaic that it misses the point. I think the meaning wobbles throughout the poem, keeping the question of how to interpret it open and unstable.
The reference is to the line "things as they are." I tend to lean with Prince and think that Stevens weighs more heavily on the need for the creative principle. In a later poem, Stevens calls refers to that creative principle as "the necessary angel." But I agree there is a tension. It seems one has to fight the wave of raw reality from over taking one and having it dominate our lives.



As one last point, I had a rather different sense of stanza five than Virgil did. Virg read this:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
In stanza five Stevens (and I think it's the narrator speaking here) establishes what a world without the creative impulse is like: A sort of dark underground, unlit, an earth flat and bare, an empty heaven. In in six, the tune is something beyond, and in the tune we are fixed in space by the guitar and so percieve beyond to a thinking of a "god". Here the religious motif first comes in, that is that only through our artistic priciple can we conceptualize a transcendence


I hadn't been thinking of this stanza in terms of a "world without the creative impulse." Or at least I'm not sure that the speakers are supposed to take on quite so negative a connotation as that summation suggests. I was vividly reminded of Plato's cave in this passage and read the "there are no shadows" motif in terms of that allegory. I was reading the speakers as those who do not live among shadows but see things clear by the true light of day, "there are no shadows in our sun." Regardless of possible Platonic allusions, it is clear that the notion of a world rooted in stark reality in this passage is filled with pure, untroubled, unshadowed light in addition to being "flat and bare." The shadows and the flickering lights, the shades and uncertainty are very markedly associated with poetry. Whether we are meant to sympathize with the unshadowed light or with the shades of poetry is, I think, ambiguous, but I think there is a question at work here about the darker side of poetry and illusion as well as the potential for a barren world without it.
No question that the poem uses the Plato image. I guess how one reads the Plato image is how one regards Stevens' sympathies. Prince and I seem to think that the shadows created by the sun are more in sympathy with Stevens's world view. Perhaps we just have a sympathy for the creative principle. Quark on the other hand seems to think that Stevens' is trying to zero in on what is reality. You Petrarch seem to think Stevens is trying to balance the two. Perhaps you're right. But the largest sections of the poem seem to be directed toward the creative principle.

Well, I didn't quite recreate what i had lost. Bummer. :(

[Virgil]

I think that's true, but I would add that there's a third concept making its way onto the stage in V. As Virgil pointed out, religion is also being talked about here. Unlike in II, III, and IV where the speaker merely wonders about art and reality, the audience here demands something more than just creativity and truth. They want a replacement for "empty heaven and its hymns"--a poetry in which they can "take their place." These are spiritual and social needs that exist separately from truth and creativity. The guitarist's audience first claims that they no longer believe in the promises of Christian mythology. They don't want to hear about "the structure of vaults upon a point of light." This is an echo of the medieval belief in God as light and the church built upon that foundation. In Dante's Paradiso, for example, God appears in a vision as a single point of light, and the identification of divinity as light was a pretty well established one by this point. The line about "torches wisping in the underground" also has parallels to Dante and the belief that the deceased live on as flames in darkened cavities beneath the Earth's surface. In V, though, this is all called into question. The audience considers this an antiquated mythology. They are now in the light--perhaps of reason--and don't acknowledge the church or God. They call upon the poet to fill that place: "Poetry/ exceeding music must take the place/ Of empty heaven and its hymns." The commentary on art and reality continues in V, but religion enters into the discussion, as well.

It is odd, though, that Stevens uses the word poetry to denote both an old mythology and a new art form. It's "greatness of poetry" that the audience doesn't believe in at the beginning and it's "Poetry/ Exceeding music" that "must take the place" at the end--a rather contradictory message. It's as though someone were saying "Don't talk to me of the deliciousness of maple syrup, but doesn't it go great with pancakes?" Stevens might be indicating that the audience wants a poetry that stands by itself and not one that relies on gods and religion, but it's an odd way he puts it. I suppose it could be there to characterize the audience as confused and self-contradictory. The first section of the poem make them look similarly confused.
Funny you should bring up Dante. Has anyone noticed that there are 33 stanzas to the poem, paralleling Dante's 33 cantos in Inferno and Purgatorio and of course there is 34 in Paradiso, one extra.

I see the religious principle in the poem as part of the creative principle that I describe. It is through the imagination in opposition to the raw realism of the shearsman that religion gets formulated. I think Stevens sees it as the dressing up of life.

I'll try to catch up with the rest tonight.

[Quark]

I was so ticked off I lost what I wrote the that the other day here, I've not come back here. But I'm back. ;)

That's tragic. I don't mean that sarcastically. That really is tragic. Something about having to rewrite something you've already written is always annoying.


The reference is to the line "things as they are." I tend to lean with Prince and think that Stevens weighs more heavily on the need for the creative principle. In a later poem, Stevens calls refers to that creative principle as "the necessary angel." But I agree there is a tension. It seems one has to fight the wave of raw reality from over taking one and having it dominate our lives.

I partially agree, but I think you're blurring two separate meanings of the words "things as they are" in this post. The phrase points in a few different directions, and I wouldn't say that Stevens has any one opinion on "things as they are."

One could interpret "things as they are" as the audience demanding a more imitative form of art. After all, it's the fantastic distortions of the blue guitar that prompts the listeners to bring up "things as they are." The first mention of it is almost accusatory: "You do not play things as they are." One could argue that this is just the audience's way of saying "play things as they are." Stevens apparently thinks this is an impossible demand as he has the guitarist respond serenely "Things as they are/ Are changed upon the blue guitar." And, since Stevens believes so strongly in poetry and art, you could then conclude that Stevens is coming down against the audience who wants "things as they are." In this sense, "things as they are" do conflict with the "creative principle." I just don't think this is the only way that "things as they are" can be understood.

For example, if "creative principle" refers to artistic creation, and "things as they are" means reality--reality in terms of that reality/imagination split we were talking about earlier--then I don't think that the "creative principle" and "things as they are" conflict with each other quite so directly. In the poem, creativity and art derive their substance from both imagination and reality. Artistic creation isn't just a free play of the imagination. Stanzas like like IX and XVII show that the "creative principle" often grows out of reality. In IX it's the "weather of the stage" that informs the actor--just as "things as they are" informs the imagination. When the imagination is compared to a lion and an animal, the poet says it uses its "fangs" to "articulate its desert days." The reality around the animal (the desert, its surroundings) directs the imagination. The "creative principle" isn't pitted against "things as they are" in this sense, and Stevens reaction to this meaning of "things as they are" would be different from that above.

[Virgil]

One could interpret "things as they are" as the audience demanding a more imitative form of art. After all, it's the fantastic distortions of the blue guitar that prompts the listeners to bring up "things as they are." The first mention of it is almost accusatory: "You do not play things as they are." One could argue that this is just the audience's way of saying "play things as they are." Stevens apparently thinks this is an impossible demand as he has the guitarist respond serenely "Things as they are/ Are changed upon the blue guitar." And, since Stevens believes so strongly in poetry and art, you could then conclude that Stevens is coming down against the audience who wants "things as they are." In this sense, "things as they are" do conflict with the "creative principle." I just don't think this is the only way that "things as they are" can be understood.

For example, if "creative principle" refers to artistic creation, and "things as they are" means reality--reality in terms of that reality/imagination split we were talking about earlier--then I don't think that the "creative principle" and "things as they are" conflict with each other quite so directly. In the poem, creativity and art derive their substance from both imagination and reality. Artistic creation isn't just a free play of the imagination. Stanzas like like IX and XVII show that the "creative principle" often grows out of reality. In IX it's the "weather of the stage" that informs the actor--just as "things as they are" informs the imagination. When the imagination is compared to a lion and an animal, the poet says it uses its "fangs" to "articulate its desert days." The reality around the animal (the desert, its surroundings) directs the imagination. The "creative principle" isn't pitted against "things as they are" in this sense, and Stevens reaction to this meaning of "things as they are" would be different from that above.

I see what you're saying and I can almost agree. You might be right, but the feeling that Stevens sides with the creative rpinciple is so strong that I'm hesitant to throw my hat in there with you. But you make a strong case.

[Quark]

I see what you're saying and I can almost agree. You might be right, but the feeling that Stevens sides with the creative rpinciple is so strong that I'm hesitant to throw my hat in there with you. But you make a strong case.

Well this might be a good lead-in for VII and VIII, as phrase "things as they are" returns in the next stanza. I don't have much to add to what's been said about V and VI, so if you want to move on that's fine with me.

[quasimodo1]

from Stevens, Collected Poetry & Prose
from Notes

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR
(unpublished Stanza X)

But then things never really are,
How does it matter how I play

Or what I color what I say?
It all depends on inter-play

Or inter-play and inter-say,
Like tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee,

Or ti-ri-la and ti-ri-li
And these I play on my guitar

And leave the final atmosphere
To the imagination of the engineer.

I could not find it if I would.
I would not find it if I could.

I cannot say what things I play,
Because I play things as they are

And since they are not as they are,
I play them on a blue guitar.

[Virgil]

I've finally really read the whole poem through and let it sink in. The first thing I always like to do is understand the structure of a work. I wasn't able to do that until now. Some people have said that the poem is just repeating in variations the same idea. No, I hav e to disagree with that. There is a development to the poem, a flow toward a conclusion. Here's an attempt to outline the structure of the poem.

Stanza 1: Intorductary statement of the central conflict of the outside world and creating a new reality through art.

Stanzas 2 thru 4: An elaboration on the theme of creating of that reality; "patching" the world on the blue guitar.

Stanzas 5 thru 7: An elaborationon on the theme of the hard unimaginative real world, an earth "flat and bare."

Stanzas 8 and 9: The internal processing of the sensual stimuli of the outside world; "the color like a thought that grows/out of a mood"

Stanzas 10 thru 14: Out of that internal processing of sensual stimuli, the world takes shape; "Slowly the ivy on the stones/becomes the stones." and "The heraldic center of the world/of blue, blue sleek with a hundred chins..."

Stanzas 15 thru 19: The internal is undermined when faced with reality: "Things as they are have been destroyed." And this internal processor of stimuli is now a "monster," unable to be both objective and subjective, it's the "lion locked in stone."

Stanzas 20 and 21: The narrator questions what to believe, the internal understanding of the world or the external. There is a tension of duality here.

Stanzas 22 thru 24: Out of this tension of the internal and external understanding of reality comes poetry. "the imagined and the real, thought/and the truth."

Stanzas 25 thru 27: The narrator, the poet, creates poetry, the internal and external crystalized into words. "The world washed in his imagination."

Stanzas 28 thru 30: The narrator, the "I" of these stanzas, is in the world trying to balance the internal and the external. "What is beyond the cathedral, outside/Balances with nuptial song."

Stanzas 31 thru 33: The narrator as peot has now sythesized the internal and the external into a comprehensive vision. "Between you and the shapes you take/When the crust of shape has been destroyed."

So the flow of the poem can be seen as a dialectic struggle between the the outside reality and the internal processing of that reality, an expression of that processing, a questioning of the expression given the descrepencies between the real and the processed, the dualistic tension between them, and finally a synthesis of both.

I must highlihgt that concluding stanza. It is magnificent.


XXXIII

That generation's dream, aviled
In the mud, in Monday's dirty light,

That's it, the only dream they knew,
Time in its final block, not time

To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
Here is the bread of time to come,

Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be

Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except

The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

That is not to say there aren't other motifs running through this. Certainly the motif of religion is very strong throughout, even in the end. Bread and stone - the bread of Christ and the rock of His church.