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:
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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:
Didn't get a chance to respond properly to Quark yesterday, but now I do.
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. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Quark
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.Quote:
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 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.
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.Quote:
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.
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.
[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..."
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love
I had some questions about this part, though:
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?Quote:
Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love
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. ;)
I'm so happy you did Petrarch. It's always a pleasure to get your thoughts, on just about anything actually. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love
I think the poem was published in 1937 and probably written not too much prior. I think you are right about what green represents.Quote:
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.
Interesting you say the guitar player. I guess he does look like a laborer. I never thought about that.Quote:
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).
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.Quote:
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.
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.Quote:
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.
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As one last point, I had a rather different sense of stanza five than Virgil did. Virg read this:
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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
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.Quote:
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.
Well, I didn't quite recreate what i had lost. Bummer. :(
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Quark
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.
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
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."Quote:
Originally Posted by 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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Quark
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.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
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.
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.
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.Quote:
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.