The
imagination wishes to be indulged.
-Wallace
Stevens
Wallace Stevens is an awesome poet.
He challenges what we know to be truth and forces readers to ask themselves if
what they are seeing it reality or a mere version of it. Stevens is to words
what Picasso is to painting. Stevens’ poetry shows us that art is a way to
describe what we see and feel around us in just the way we wish to see it. It
has been previously mentioned that each reading of a Stevens poem will bring
with it a new meaning and a new interpretation. That is because as readers we
are never in the same moment of our lives twice and therefore what we need and
desire of a poem will never replicate itself. This is why as Stevens says “we
do not have to be told of the significance of art”[1] because
the significance will become as clear to the reader as they need it to be. Just
as poetry is creating a version of reality, painting does the same only in a
different medium. There is an intrinsic relationship between Stevens and
painters, particularly with the modern artists. By examining Wallace Stevens’
poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar” a reader can extrapolate a multitude of
meaning, significance, and references to the real world outside of the words of
the poem, and that seems to be the intention of Stevens. The second part to
this poem that screams for attention is Picasso’s painting “The Old Guitarist”,
a modern expressionist painting that depicts an old man hunched over a guitar.
The connection between these two modern arts pieces are not far reaching, the
ideologies of the two respective creators, Stevens and Picasso, are very
similar and thus the outcomes of their work share several characteristics.
Stevens explains that “the world about us would be desolate except for the
world within us. There is the same interchange between these two worlds that
there is between one art and another.”[2] People
give meaning to the world, and art makes the world have meaning to people. “The
Man with the Blue Guitar” provides a microcosmic platform to look at the
symbiotic relationship of these ideas about Stevens, reality and truth.
Looking first at Stevens’ personal
regard for poetry and painting enlightens us to his own feelings and takes away
the need for much assumption. “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting” is an
essay that provides a lot of different information and ideas, and few answers.
But again it is not Stevens who we turn to for answers, he is there to shed a
different light and provide guidance to the answer for which we need in that
moment. Stevens does clearly convey that “one of the characteristics of modern
art is that it is uncompromising” and through that it is able to contain the
truth of reality. In an article written by Bruce Lawder, he mentions in his
first paragraph that “the whole effort of modern art has been about: the
attachment to real things”.[3]
It is upon the blue guitar that Stevens alludes to the truth being resident of,
saying that “that’s life, then: things as they are, This buzzing of the blue
guitar” and “of things as they are, as the blue guitar”. These lines say many
things, one, is that the blue guitar is as real as life is real. The guitar is
a physical object, it can be held, strummed, and looked at more or less unchanging,
the guitar is an easy truth to realize. Michel Benamou clarifies that “there
were two realities for Stevens-- the reality of things observed and the reality
of things imagined” and this duality is what makes his poetry so expansive and
relatable to so many different people.[4] The
“buzzing” is the creation of the guitar, it cannot be held or seen, and it is
always changing in unimaginable combinations, it is more of an unrealizable
truth. And yet, this physical object
plays the truth of life, of things as they are. This is an example of the
“reality beyond reality” which Stevens references in “The Relations Between
Poetry and Painting”. He also explains that through art “the search for the
supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search
for supremely acceptable fiction”.[5]
Art is one of the most important ways of subscribing meaning both to and from
the world we live in. When one form of art may not suffice it is nice to have a
coinciding item to help affix more or better meaning. This is how Picasso’s
painting and the poem help each other reach a new level of sublimity, the one
picks up where the other leaves off. Michel Benamou expounds that “Stevens
teaches us that the center of modern art is metamorphosis” the change and the
morphing of artistic mediums fits this thought as well, the guitar in the poem
and the guitar in the painting are in different stages of their being, but that
is dependent on the viewer.[6] Benamou also mentions that “the metaphors of
poetry and the metamorphoses of painting tap the same reservoir analogies” and
this is another layer adding to why the two arts are so complexly
interconnected.[7]
The reality is that nothing is the same twice, in order to capture or explain
something the most comprehensive way to achieve that would be through many
different mediums.
The senses are another way to
approach the poem, “The Man With the Blue Guitar”, sight and sound play into
the poem and the painting working together to create a greater meaning. The
reader can speak the words of the poem as easily as they can see them written
on the page. The painting can only be seen, but the cliché that a picture is
worth a thousand words is very applicable. Seeing something gives tangible
proof and a constant with which to revert to. The idea of using the senses to
gain sensibility about the art in front of us is not a random notion. Stevens
says that “the origins of poetry are to be found in sensibility”, without an
audience’s response the purpose of art is moot. Benamou notes that “visual
appearance and mental reality are one...the mind of the beholder mirrors his
surroundings and fluctuates with the slightest change of light”.[8]
As I mentioned before, the viewer sees or hears what they want or need at that
precise moment, as the light changes on the painting or in the room where the
poem is being read so too does the meaning of the art. It is near impossible to
see what we do not already have a sense of knowing. The two stanzas of Cantos
VI read:
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.
One
way of looking at these lines is to look literally at what the words mean; god
cannot be seen in clarity, but only through a haze. The guitar is where reality
of space lives and gives true light to things, and the guitar is the link that
makes sense of it all, gives composure to the fictions of truth in the world we
live in.
Each one of the cantos in this very
long poem paints a picture for the reader, words narrating the creation of
mental images all conjuring the vivid reality of light and dark, life and
change. Cantos VI can be looked at to gain even closer familiarity with Stevens
and what the poem is trying to convey. Each line, each word Stevens uses is no
accident, the words are chosen as purposefully as paint hues were chosen and
lines were drawn by Picasso. With a meticulous eye that only a great artist
could achieve. “A thing beyond us as we are, Yet nothing changed by the blue
guitar” is the opening line of the cantos and it is not easy to digest and
offers so much to the reader. Stevens seems to be trying to convey that we cannot
understand because things are beyond us, but that it is completely fine to feel
this way, because we have things like music, poetry, and painting to help reign
in the meaning. One of the few things we can be certain about is uncertainty,
but Stevens lends his writing as the place to find solace in this idea. Another
line from the IX cantos reads “the maker of a thing yet to be made” and that is
Stevens and the it is also the reader. The future is unknown by everyone and
there is no point in driving oneself crazy over trying to sort it out, just sit
back and listen to the buzz of the guitar, that is why art exists, as a refuge
from the chaos that bombards our senses in the world. “Of things as they are
and only the place you play them, on the blue guitar, Placed so beyond the
compass of change, perceived in a final atmosphere”. Living in the now, the
present is what matters. The Lucretian idea that death should not be feared
because you will not know death any more than you were aware of birth shines
through preeminently in these lines. Stevens gives readers the encouragement to
just enjoy what you believe to be true and what is good for you, and the rest
will fall away into insignificance. “For a moment final, in the way The
thinking of art seems final when The thinking of god is smoky dew.” Nothing is
final. Everything changes, but for one instance finality can be achieved for a
breadth of time, before the next wave of change washes over it. The smoke can
clear and the artist can create, capturing that instant in a forever fixed
position. The art does not change, but the need for it and the viewer of it do,
that is what keeps art constantly alive.
“It would be tragic not to realize
the extent of man’s dependence on the arts”.[9] The arts
keep us sane; they keep us alive as much as we keep them alive. Stevens
believes in the supreme fiction being the truth of reality. Modern art is this
supreme fiction and as Stevens says, “it has a reason for everything. Even the
lack of a reason becomes a reason...This explains everything”.[10]
Michel Benamou ends his chapter on Poetry and Painting with this thought, that
art is “understood as the poetic and moral principle of an order protecting us
from chaos, art becomes more than a source of beautiful shapes and colors; it
becomes a ‘supreme fiction’”.[11]
This metamorphoses into something more is what Stevens achieves with his words.
The subject of his poems is poetry because nothing more is needed. Within the scope
of his poetry he shows us what we want and what we need, sometimes without our
consent and sometimes without conscious recognition, but if answers are needed
they are there, forever changing and forming new truths and a new idea of
reality.
The power of poetry, leaves a mark on
whatever it touches.
The
mark of poetry creates the resemblance of poetry
as between the most disparate things and
unites them all in its recognizable virtue.
-Wallace Stevens
[1]
Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose.
“The Relations Between Poetry and Painting”. Literary Classics of the U.S.,
Inc. New York, NY. 1997. Pg 747.
[3]
Lawder, Bruce. “Poetry and Painting: Wallace Stevens and Pierre Tal-Coat”. Word
and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry.
18.1.2002. 348-356. Pg 348.
[4]
Benamou,
Michel. Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist
Imagination. Princeton University Press. 1972. Pg
20.
[6]
Benamou, Michel. Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist
Imagination. Princeton University Press. 1972. Pg 9.
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