The Man with the
Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens
THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR, the long title
poem of Stevens’s third collection of verse, invariably evokes Picasso’s blue period painting of the same subject, bent over his instrument of art with creative intensity. The analogy, given the experiments with
form of the day, is apt.
Form and function in BLUE GUITAR work together. The unprecedented improvisational form of the poem mirrors the improvisational thinking in it. The splendid blank verse of “Sunday Morning” and IDEAS OF ORDER break up into a poem of thirty-three numbered but discontinuous sections, composed of between five to eight pairs of unrhymed couplets. Thus, the form underscores the impression that the guitarist is extemporizing; that the images and ideas are just tumbling about in is mind, searching for the right chords or
color combinations.
Disjointed verbal improvisations mimic the musical improvisations in BLUE GUITAR, so that the arrangement of
themes and sequences resembles the non-representational motifs of the world of art. Stevens’s themes, always difficult to paraphrase, are color-coded. Blue is the color of the imagination. Green is the color of reality. The perfect blend of that blue and green is the object of
poetry. His imagery and allusions in BLUE GUITAR explore the themes that pervade his later poetry:
A) Poetry (creative vision) is the subject of the poem. B) BLUE GUITAR processes reality and changes the perception of reality without changing its concrete nature. C) This phenomenological rendition, later developed at length as the “supreme fiction,” is the centerpiece of Stevens’s outlook. D) Numinous secular poetry may serve as a successor to outworn modes of belief. E) The world remains in a state of Heracliltean flux, for both reader and poet, and modern poetry composed on the BLUE GUITAR must recognize those shifts since, as he defines the changes in ON MODERN POETRY, the poetic stage has changed radically.
In the last sections of the poem, the guitarist/poet vows to “evolve a man,” a new version of a heroic presence related to but distinct from traditional creative heroes. The evolved man must be a perceptive hero with his feet always planted on the ground of his circumstances, and not, as were his predecessors in the Romantic age of poetry, imprisoned in some visionary or idealistic emblem, like Shelley’s preternatural skylark shut up in the archives of the sky. Stevens returns to the idea of a new kind of hero repeatedly in his subsequent work. In BLUE GUITAR he imagines the transcendent hero as a lion locked up in the guitar (guitarist), as opposed to reality, a lion carved in changeless stone.
Stevens’s stylistic development, in both his short and extended poems, is distinguishable, but his thematic development, in part because of his changing forms and in part because his habitual use of unusual and sparkling figures, challenges the reader, especially in individual books. The parts, like BLUE GUITAR, foreshadow the whole, and the whole illuminates the parts.