The Man with the Blue Guitar

[Virgil]

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

Well, any death bed conversion may seem weird. It is something that is surely an about face to some degree. Though I have said that Stevens' attitude to God and the hereafter seems to alter toward his later poems. Perhaps not completely unexpected.

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

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

The same would hold for the other sacrements.

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

[quasimodo1]

Wallace Stevens



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

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR VII (manuscript version)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(from the revised edition of Opus Posthumous)

[quasimodo1]

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

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR IX (manuscript version)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(from the revised edition of Opus Posthumous)

[Quark]

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

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

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR VII (manuscript version)

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

[quasimodo1]

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

[quasimodo1]

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

THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR XV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Quark]

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

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

XXII

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

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

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

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

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

[Petrarch's Love]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Quark]

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

Hi, Petrarch. How's your summer going?

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

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

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

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

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

[Virgil]

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

[Petrarch's Love]

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

[Petrarch's Love]

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

Hi, Petrarch. How's your summer going?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[quasimodo1]

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

[Quark]

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

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

I had some questions about this part, though:

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

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

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

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

[Virgil]

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

Hi all. Just poking my head in again after a rather extended absence from these forums. But who could resist a discussion of this marvelous poem?

I'm so happy you did Petrarch. It's always a pleasure to get your thoughts, on just about anything actually.

First as to Virgil's initial question about why the day is green. Others in this thread have suggested what I think is the clearest reading, that green represents everyday reality in contrast to the "imagination" represented by the blue guitar. I wanted to highlight this, though because it looked as though no one had explicitly brought up the style of Picasso's art as an important aspect of this poetic response to it. I'm guessing this poem was written in a time when cubism, surrealism, and abstract art were being considered novel, groundbreaking, and potentially baffling.

I think the poem was published in 1937 and probably written not too much prior. I think you are right about what green represents.

Thus it seems to me that an initial gloss of these lines would be as a reaction to non-traditional art. The day, as a matter of fact, was green, so why is he painting it blue? That's not the way it is. As an additional layer of meaning I wonder about "green" as a connotation of the conventional pastoral, especially since he evokes the "shearsman." Is this a poet moving away from acting as conservative shepherd to the avant-garde artist shearing the sheep? (Incidentally, I also very much agree with Virgil's reading of the shearsman as both distinctly manual labor and lower class. In this sense he is very much aligned with the real, the tactile and it is interesting that this would be the individual who holds the blue guitar. This tension between artist and laborer is also at work in the painting, of course, which depicts a figure who is at once quotidian peasant laborer and Quixote).

Interesting you say the guitar player. I guess he does look like a laborer. I never thought about that.

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

I'm not sure Stevens is commenting on abstract art so much. He may associate himself with it, but I think his general thrust is that the artist (abstract, traditional, whatever) creates the world around us and that the creative principal in all mankind dresses the world from the bare, raw basics of life. I might actually go so far as to say the artist codifies that collective imagination.

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

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

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

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

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

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

No question that the poem uses the Plato image. I guess how one reads the Plato image is how one regards Stevens' sympathies. Prince and I seem to think that the shadows created by the sun are more in sympathy with Stevens's world view. Perhaps we just have a sympathy for the creative principle. Quark on the other hand seems to think that Stevens' is trying to zero in on what is reality. You Petrarch seem to think Stevens is trying to balance the two. Perhaps you're right. But the largest sections of the poem seem to be directed toward the creative principle.

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