The Man with the Blue Guitar

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Originally Posted by Quark

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by 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. ;)

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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.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Quark

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.