The Man with the Blue Guitar

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..._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.

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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.

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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."

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:

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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.

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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

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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.

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Originally Posted by 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."

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

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Originally Posted by 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.

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

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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.

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http://www.geegaw.com/stories/the_ma...e_guitar.shtml

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Originally Posted by JBI

http://www.geegaw.com/stories/the_ma...e_guitar.shtml

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

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."

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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."

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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."

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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:

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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.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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

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

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Originally Posted by Quark

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

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

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Originally Posted by Virgil

No, I'll continue tonight.

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

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Originally Posted by JBI

http://www.geegaw.com/stories/the_ma...e_guitar.shtml

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JBI is always one step ahead.

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.

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

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.

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Originally Posted by JBI

http://www.geegaw.com/stories/the_ma...e_guitar.shtml

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

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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.

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

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Originally Posted by PrinceMyshkin

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

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

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.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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.

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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:

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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?

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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.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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

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

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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.

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

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Originally Posted by JBI

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.

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

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Originally Posted by JBI

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by JBI

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by JBI

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:

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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.

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Originally Posted by Quark

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.

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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:

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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.

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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.]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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You may be right. I think I was to hasty in my conceptualizing of the poem above. I think it's way more complex.

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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.

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I agree with you here. I had not really absorbed thge poem fully when I made that statement. Sorry.

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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.

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You're on the ball, Quarky. I agree.

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.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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

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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).

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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:

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Originally Posted by Virgil

[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.]

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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?

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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

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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?

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Originally Posted by Virgil

You're on the ball, Quarky.

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

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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."

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Originally Posted by PrinceMyshkin

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

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I hate when I have that feeling.

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Originally Posted by PrinceMyshkin

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?

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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.

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Originally Posted by Quark

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).

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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:

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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,

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It is through poetry that the world takes flesh and is more than mere objects. Read stanza XI:

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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.

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Yes the chord "falsifies" but without the chord is nothing; it is through the prism of metaphor that life gains relationship and three dimensionality.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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

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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?

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Ten is a wonderful stanza and deserves posting:

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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."

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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.

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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?

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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/p...ns/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/~afilre...onversion.html. The letter seems quite credible to me.

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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?

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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.

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

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:lol: I do take you seriously. That was a term of endearment and affection. :D

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?

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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

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

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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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

Ten is a wonderful stanza and deserves posting:

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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.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

I am not a Stevens scholar.

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

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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.

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I could see that.


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

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Originally Posted by 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?

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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.

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)

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)

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Originally Posted by Il Penseroso

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).

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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.

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Originally Posted by quasimodo1

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR VII (manuscript version)

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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?

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.

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

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):

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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

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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.

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:

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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."

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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:

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Originally Posted by 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.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

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

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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:

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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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love

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

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Hi, Petrarch. How's your summer going?

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Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love

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.

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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.

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: