The Man with the Blue Guitar

[JBI]

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

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

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

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

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

[Jozanny]

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

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

[PrinceMyshkin]

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

[Virgil]

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

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

[PrinceMyshkin]

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

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

[Virgil]

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

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

[Quark]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In that sense, this stanza:

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


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

[Virgil]

Yeah, reality and imagination are two important, and antagonistic, ideas in the poem. They may be the most important. From the very beginning Stevens is worried that the blue guitar can only portray the world imaginatively, and that listeners too absorbed by the music might mistake his playing for reality. The first fourteen stanza raise the oft-struck Platonic alarm that poetry is a dangerous teacher.

I don't really think the poem is dealing with the platonic notion of art. I think it's much more copmplex than that. What Stevens is saying is that the artisitic priniciple in man (the blue guitar being a metaphor) is what creates the world. Let's move to stanzas V and VI:

V

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After that, though, the poem gives a much more even-handed treatment. As the poem becomes less concerned with society, and more personal, the speaker acknowledges that both reality and imagination, sun and moon, the lion of "lute" and the lion "locked in stone" are necessary.

As I'm reading this more carefully, I have to take back what I said that the stanzas are a sort of theme and variation. No, not at all. I think there is a strong line of development that runs from beginning to end. That satnza with the lion and the lute was absolutely incredible, one of the best pieces of poetic writing I have ever seen. I'll get to it eventually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Quark]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You're on the ball, Quarky.

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

[PrinceMyshkin]

A poem should not mean
but be

Archibald Macleish, "Ars Poetica"

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

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

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

[JBI]

A poem should not mean
but be

Archibald Macleish, "Ars Poetica"

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

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

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

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

[Quark]

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

I hate when I have that feeling.

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

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

Always a danger

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

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

[Virgil]

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

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

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

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

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

XI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you taking stanza V as Stevens talking? I tend to see those lines as meaning the opposite of what they say. When it's said that "There are no shadows anywhere" or "There are no shadows in our sun" it sounds like Stevens is trying to plant some doubt in the reader's mind.

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

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

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

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

Ten is a wonderful stanza and deserves posting:

X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ever the prelude to your end,
The touch that topples men and rock."

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

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

I am not a Stevens scholar. I have not even read a biography. I don't know what to make of his religion. As I read the poems you can see even here there is a religious speculation, but one can read in Man with the Blue Guitar as an atheistic reality against a self created diety. But as one reads the later poems, I see the imagination as a channel to the diety, which is quite different. I don't know how else to read "Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour," which is one of my favorite Stevens poems: http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/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.

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

I agree, this poem does remind me of In Memoriam in the way it goes from idea to idea but yet carrying a developmental thrust.

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

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

[Jozanny]

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

[Quark]

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

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

XI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten is a wonderful stanza and deserves posting:

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

I am not a Stevens scholar.

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

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

I could see that.


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