Wallace Stevens’ "The Man With The Blue Guitar" is one of his most famous long poems. For a better understanding of the poem, it is necessary to examine the art forms of Modernism that influenced him while composing this poem and to have a look at his poetic development. Only then, it becomes clear that this poem is typically modern and that at the same time Stevens’ own way of poetic composition cannot be compared to any other poet of Modernism. This is the aim of this essay.
Wallace Stevens already published his first poetic work during his College years at Harvard University (1897-1900). However, it took him many years until he could contribute himself fully to poetry. The first major collections of poetry, Harmonium, came out in 1923 when Stevens was 44 years old. Only in times of financial security, Stevens had a leading position in an insurance company did he reach his highest poetic creativity.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. We Stevens and American Modernism
3. “The Man With The Blue Guitar”
3.1. Modern art in “The Man With The Blue Guitar”
3.2. Surrealism in “The Man With The Blue Guitar”
4. Conclusion
Works Cited
Wallace Stevens’ Modernist Composition of “The Man With The Blue Guitar”
1. Introduction
Wallace Stevens’ “The Man With The Blue Guitar” is one of his most famous long poems. For a better understanding of the poem, it is necessary to examine the art forms of Modernism that influenced him while composing this poem and to have a look at his poetic development. Only then, it becomes clear that this poem is typically modern and that at the same time Stevens’ own way of poetic composition cannot be compared to any other poet of Modernism.
2. Wallace Stevens and American Modernism
Wallace Stevens already published his first poetic work during his College years in Harvard University (1897-1900), however, it took him many years until he could contribute himself fully to poetry. The first major collections of poetry, Harmonium, came out in 1923 when Stevens was 44 years old. Only in times of financial security- Stevens had a leading position in an insurance company- did he reach his highest poetic creativity.
Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania. His father Garret Stevens was a hard working businessman hoped that his son’s love for poetry was not serious and would not interfere “with some real hard work”.1
During Steven’s studies of humanities, he developed something that would accompany him throughout his life and appears even in his famous poems such as “The Man With The Blue Guitar” : to depict the things he saw, for example his personal observations during his lonely walks and let his imagination play with it, so that things, caught in the moment, turned into playful poetry. “…When we try to picture what we see, the purely imaginary is transcended, like listening in the dark we seem to really hear what we are listening for… Catch the reflected sun - rays, get plausible emotions-instead of stings and tears…”2, he wrote to his father during College time.
According to Lensing, his first poetry included own experimentations as well as poems similar to writers of the romanticism, Keats and Wordsworth. After College, Stevens made a “pseudo-villain” compromise, as he called it;3 to earn enough money first, and then devote himself to poetry. This compromise would remain through his whole life. He finished a law school and started working in an insurance company but never liked his job; he described it as dull and that he often started writing sonnets at the office, automatically.
Only in 1908 came his first little success in the insurance company and only then did he marry Elsie. His first financial success allowed him to focus on poetry again.
In 1909 Stevens gave his wife Elsie a book with colleted poems, June Book as a birthday present, but did not publish it first. Lensing calls the poems of June Book pre-imagist poetry, because of its “direct introduction of the colour”. In this time, Stevens’ own style resembled poetry of imagism-movement, but he wrote “June Book” years before the Imagist school was established.4 Typical for the Imagist school of modern poetry was the “direct treatment of the thing”, the composition of poems as songs and the inclusion of only those words that would contribute to the whole presentation. Ezra Pound was the founder of the Imagist movement. He left America in 1910 and went to Europe, first to London and then to Paris. There, especially in the years after World War I he became internationally known as the leading figure of modern poetry and Imagism. Imagists freed themselves from traditions, from metre in poetry. They did not use storytelling in their poetry but focused on the moment, which they caught in the poem as the painter catches the moment in his painting. Instead of rhymes, the rhythm of music made up a poem. The connection between the poem and the painting was more direct than indirect. The following poem from June Book, “Shower”, depicts colours and moments of nature and paints with it a picture:
Pink and purple In water-mist And hazy leaves Of amethyst; Orange and green And grey between, (1-6)5
Later, however, Stevens created his own style influenced by many art forms of the Avant Garde. During his years in New York, he developed an interest in modern art. The Armory Show, which Stevens visited in 1913, was America’s first art exhibition of European and American modern art. It showed works of Cubists and post-impressionists and introduced Modernism to America.
The Avant Garde art movement was the response from different art forms to the break with old traditions in life during the first half of the 20th century. It was a pessimistic response, a protest to the current condition in form of anti-art to the alienation and loss of identity and religion. Just as moral of life was destroyed by World War I, World War II, and the Economic Depression started artists to break with all traditions from earlier art forms “to make it new”. The responses of literature and art were Imagism, Dada, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Modernists felt that the world could no longer go on as it used to be and that there was a need to replace it by something new.
The cubist painting, Nude Descending a Staircase from Marcel Duchamp, exhibited at the Armory Show in 1913, became a symbol for all American modern art. Instead of a nude person, it shows Marcel Duchamp, “Nude Descending a Staircase, no2”, (1912) a robot like, kinetic moving creature full of juxtapositions. Picasso’s cubist paintings, such as Violin and Guitar, were shown in this exhibition, too. Established forms of art did not exist anymore, cubist artists broke with all old traditions and people were presented new art forms that shocked them. It was by his College friend Arensberg, an art collector, that Stevens was introduced to the Avant Garde cycle and met Duchamp. Not only modern paintings but also Duchamp’s readymades, invented in 1913, influenced Steven’s poetry in Harmonium, and also his later poetry, including the long poem “The Man With The Blue Guitar” , which I will show later.
From the publication of Harmonium until 1933 Stevens almost abandoned poetry. The friendship to Arensberg broke up; in 1916, he moved to Hartford. In 1934 Stevens became vice president of an insurance company and soon, devoted himself to poetry again, yet without loosing the focus on his business duties.
In the 30’s, other Avant Garde art forms influenced his poetic creativity.
In 1931 the Hartford Wadsworth Atheneum art museum exhibited works of Surrealism. Three years later, in 1934 it exhibited the first retrospective of Picasso in America where it is assumed Stevens viewed Pablo Picassos The Old Guitarist. In the 30’s the literary and art movement Surrealism was introduced to America; influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis, artists of Surrealism wanted to represent the unconsciousness.
Stevens’ second major collection of poetry, Ideas of Order, came out in 1936. One Year later, in 1937, he published The Man With The Blue Guitar. The Man With The Blue Guitar includes one long poem composed of many short poems with the same title, and another three poems.
3. “The Man With The Blue Guitar”
“The Man With The Blue Guitar” consists of 33 sections, all-catching certain moments, sometimes simply things and presenting them in a playful, colourful environment, without any rhyme scheme. It cannot be said that the poem carries one particular meaning; it is better to say that Stevens played with the words what contributed to the presentation full of pictures. Very typical of modernist poems is that there is no narrative one can follow from section to section, instead Stevens uses contrasts and juxtapositions, according to MacLeod these juxtapositions would resemble juxtapositions in cubist paintings.6 Similar to Imagists, Stevens presented pictures with words. But Stevens’ unique style is more than Imagism alone; it combines various aspects of Modernism, including Cubism and Surrealism.
3.1. Modern art in “The Man With The Blue Guitar”
The guitar player, introduced in the first section in the third person as “The Man bent over his guitar” is asked by his audience to play “things exactly as they are”, but he cannot fulfil the expectations of his audience, and replies that “Things as they are/ are changed upon the blue guitar.” (I) Since the mass audience of the guitar player wants things as they are, he has to play for another audience.
In fact, modernist poets did not want to publish their work in mass magazines for the mass audience, they wanted only very few readers. Picasso’s The Old Guitarist shows a guitar player who is just skin and bones almost dead, bent over his guitar, as if the guitar was the only thing that kept him alive. It is a painting of Picasso’s blue period, characterized by many melancholic paintings. But at the . Pablo Picasso, “The Old Guitarist” (1903) same time, it is the guitar playing that deadens him, maybe because he does not play what the audience wants him to play. It is assumed that there is a connection between this painting and the Steven’s guitar player, and I agree with that. Especially the first two sections of the poem that describe the guitar player playing on his blue guitar remind of Picasso’s painting. The guitar is the only thing in the painting that is not blue. The clothes of the guitar player, his skin and the background are blue so that the guitar in Stevens’ Man With The Blue Guitar possibly takes over the colours that surround it on the painting The Old Guitarist. I believe that section IX is also connected to this painting because it again describes the blue colour that surrounds the guitar. (see page 10)
Nevertheless, the obvious similarity between this painting and “The Man With The Blue Guitar” is not given in the whole poem, so that it makes more sense to say that modern art altogether, instead of one particular painting alone, is presented in this poem.
The music that comes out of the blue guitar in “The Man With The Blue Guitar” is real, but the guitarist, representing any artist of the Modernist movement, presents it in his own way, against any expectations very similar to Duchamp’s readymades. Douchamp invented the readymade technique in 1913 by taking ordinary, mass produced things that were not considered as art and putting them in a complete unexpected environment. His most famous readymade Fountain by R. Mutt (1917) shows an urinal.
Duchamp “took it out of the earth and put it into a planet of aesthetics”; Mec Leod describes it as “creating a new thought” for objects.7 Marcel Duchamp, “Fountain by R. Mutt”(1917)
In the second section, it is not the third person, but the guitar player himself is speaking to the audience. “I cannot bring a world quite round/ Although I patch it as I can.” (II) The world that he draws by the music of his blue guitar is different. The destruction of old values and traditions by war made it impossible for the guitar player to play and for the painter to paint the way thy used to.
Still, “things as they are” are not really changed, they stay the same. The guitarist just depicts them and puts them into a different place trough his music, so that they appear from a different point of view, or “from different points of views” as objects in Cubist paintings, mentions Patke8:
Ourselves in the tune as if in space, Yet nothing changed, expect 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, (VI).
The line “The tune is space” from the sixth section is according to Patke the only space “in which things can be” and compares it again with Cubism. Because of their new environment, things would create or “compose” themselves a new identity, a new meaning, the only meaning in which they can survive.9
The speaking voice of this section can be seen as the audience speaking to the guitar player, the audience that decided to listen to the music of the guitar player with the blue guitar.
Section IX, the guitar player becomes “The maker of a thing yet to be made” (IX). It is the act of creating that all artists share. In his essays about his poetic theory, The Necessary Angel, “Relations Between Poetry and Painting” , Stevens mentions Baudelaire’s idea of a fundamental aesthetic or order, “of which poetry and painting are manifestations”, but of which the composing of music and the creation of all form of arts, “would equally be a manifestation.”.10 Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a French modern poet and the founder of Symbolism, an art form that does not represent things in a realistic way, but shows its idea by changing it.
However, for Stevens, this statement of an equal manifestation is not enough, he speaks about the detail of the painting, or a painter’s remark on his painting, which would be very similar to the remark of a poet on his poetry, so that these details of art would contribute to the relation between the poet and the painter.
In his essay Stevens also mentions that the poet composes a poem “by virtue of an effort of the mind” and compares it to the painter, who would do his job by imagination. Art would emerge through imagination by using the “familiar to produce the unfamiliar”.11 Even if each form of art uses its own tools, the painter uses colours and shapes, the poet words and the musician uses melody, it is the imagination, trough which they compose their work. The lines of section IX show that the act of creating or composing is similar for all artists.
In this section, the guitar player performs for the first time on stage. The metaphor of an actor performing his speech “…with melancholy words” (IX) can be interpreted as the melancholy words, or sounds of the guitarist’s music as well as the words of the poet.
[...]
1 G.S. Lensing, George S. Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.
2 Lensing, George S. Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1986) 17
3 Lensing, George S. Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1986) 23
4 Lensing, George S. Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1986) 88
5 Lensing, George S. Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1986) 88
6 MacLeod, Glen. Wallace Stevens and Modern Art. (New York and London: Yale University Press, 1993) 11
7 MacLeod, Glen. Wallace Stevens and Modern Art. (New York and London: Yale University Press, 1993) 20
8 Patke, Rajeev S. The long poems of Wallace Stevens. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985) 86
9 Patke, Rajeev S. The long poems of Wallace Stevens. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985) 86
10 Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. (The Library of America, 1985) 740
11 Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. (The Library of America, 1985) 742
-
Laden Sie Ihre eigenen Arbeiten hoch! Geld verdienen und iPhone X gewinnen. -
Laden Sie Ihre eigenen Arbeiten hoch! Geld verdienen und iPhone X gewinnen. -
Laden Sie Ihre eigenen Arbeiten hoch! Geld verdienen und iPhone X gewinnen. -
Laden Sie Ihre eigenen Arbeiten hoch! Geld verdienen und iPhone X gewinnen. -
Laden Sie Ihre eigenen Arbeiten hoch! Geld verdienen und iPhone X gewinnen. -
Laden Sie Ihre eigenen Arbeiten hoch! Geld verdienen und iPhone X gewinnen.