The Man With The Blue Guitar, Including Ideas of Order

by Wallace Stevens

The Man With the Blue Guitar is a poem published in 1937 by Wallace Stevens. It is divided into thirty-three brief sections, or cantos.

The poem has been discussed as taking the form of an imaginary conversation with the subject of Pablo Picasso's 1903-04 painting The Old Guitarist, which Stevens may have viewed when it was exhibited at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1934. But Stevens insisted this influence was only peripheral. In a letter dated July 1, 1953, to Professor Renato Poggioli, who had recently translated his poem into Italian, Stevens wrote: "I had no particular painting of Picasso's in mind and even though it might help to sell the book to have one of his paintings on the cover, I don't think we ought to reproduce anything of Picasso's."[1]

Paul Mariani, a biographer of Stevens, presented a counterpoint to these objections raised by Stevens concerning the origin of this poem stating, "Despite his repeatedly denying it, Stevens does seem to have a particular painting in mind here: Picasso's 1903 The Old Guitarist, which portrays an old man with white hair and beard sitting distorted and cross-legged as he plays his guitar. If Picasso attempted to portray the world of poverty and abject misery, it was because that had been his own plight as a struggling young artist in Barcelona, where he painted many pictures including this one, of the poor. The painting is almost entirely done in monochromatic blues and blue-blacks, except for the guitar itself, which is painted in a slightly warmer brown. The man is blind but, no longer seeing the world around him, he sees more deeply into the reality within."

In the poem, an unnamed "they" says, of the titular man, "you do not play things as they are", sparking a prolonged meditation on the nature of art, performance, and imagination.

Stevens began writing the poem in December 1936, not long after his completion of the poetry collection Owl's Clover in the spring of that year. The Man With the Blue Guitar became one of his most successful long poems, and William Carlos Williams wrote at the time that he considered it one of Stevens's best works.

Genres: Poetry, Literature

188 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1937

About the author

Wallace Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine) was written at the age of thirty-five, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned fifty. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who called Stevens the "best and most representative" American poet of the time, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius.

Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903. On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel; after a long courtship, he married her in 1909. In 1913, the young couple rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie.
A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems.

After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he was hired on January 13, 1908 as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company. By 1914 he had become the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This death was his belief though death is a stone.
This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.

The night wind blows upon the dreamer, bent
Over words that are life's voluble utterance.

My dreams were flattened. Possibly they were blunted by phlegm rather than worry. I know of the night winds and the personal bliss which is a Sunday morning. Stevens gave us magnificent structure, a hallowed alcove on which to give thanks. The legacy of Simic persists and I enjoyed reveling in the blurred logic of Modernism half lit by espresso and Delta blues. It indeed was Simic's nod to Witold Gombrowicz about how to reconcile Dasein with croissants that led me to fawn over Stevens casting a glance at Picasso and penning Of the torches wisping in the underground.

So we sit humbled. I had a friend ask in earnest yesterday about how to read poetry. I considered the images of ladders and toolboxes and instead spoke about breathing and available light. My effectiveness is in doubt.

[belisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

çevirisi çok özensiz geldiği için İngilizcesiyle karşılaştırarak okudum, uzun sürdü, güzel şiirler var ama bence yeniden çevrilmeli...

[António Jacinto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Não há 6 estrelas.
Denso. Com as explicações do próprio Stevens, nas cartas escritas a Renato Poggioli, fica tudo mais claro. O binómio imaginação/realidade. Fernando Pessoa também o abordou e fica a minha dúvida em saber se Pessoa conheceu alguma coisa de Stevens. WS certamente não conheceu nada do poeta português.
Provavelmente, o mais importante poeta norte-americano do século XX. Pelo menos para mim. Nascido um pouco antes de Pessoa e tendo-lhe sobrevivido (1955).
Não sei. Terei que rever tudo o que penso da poesia moderna. Stevens supera tudo o que conheço.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

absoLUTELY yes this is one of his most iconic collections & rightly so. That title poem - his painterly and painters! inweaving. A masterclass in Ars Poetica

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.

[Illiterate · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title poem is the highlight - a meditation on the place of poetry and imagination in modernity.

[c · Rating 5 out of 5]

The natural competitor for "The Man with the Blue Guitar" and "Owl's Clover" is "The Comedian as the Letter C" from Harmonium. Taken apart or together, and despite a few moments of "bad wit", they compete pretty valiantly.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

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."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

This poem creates a sequence of metaphors that parallel to the poet’s stated goal of existential emotion. It is difficult to say that the poem has a single meaning; rather, Stevens plays with words, which contribute to the visual presentation. There is no narrative to follow from section to section, which is typical of modernist poems; instead, Stevens uses disparities and juxtapositions, which are comparable to collocations in cubist paintings. Stevens, like the Imagists, presents images with words. But Stevens' distinct style is more than just Imagism; it incorporates elements of both Cubism and Surrealism. 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 is unable to meet their expectations and responds, "Things as they are changed upon the blue guitar." Because the guitar player's mass audience wants things as they are, he must play for another audience.

[Rhys Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frontloaded like a MOTHERfucker, wow-
Some of the most incisive explanations of the art-consciousness pipeline but OH- this guy’s RACIST racist huh.

Owl’s clover is where it goes off the rails, but he nails the western-centric ideology so clearly that his receptors are so finely tuned even when they’re pointed in precisely the wrong direction.

VERY obvious why Harold Bloom loves this guy, and serves to me as a perfect explanation of the moral failure of solely upholding a western canon, even as it attempts to argue the opposite. Definitely makes you a more acute reader, and I’m finding such a great test of my own agency in consuming work. Better than his second but not nearly as good as Harmonium- a sentiment I hope I won’t have to repeat a fourth time?

[Orest Mercator · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unfinished review in the form of a note to self scribbled in the margin (not for public consumption):

Here he is starting to either achieve or opt for what feels to me like a greater lucidity and marriage of content and form. But it's more than form; it's very verbal, this accomplishment of felicity. What was it again that Geoffrey Hill said/quoted in “poetry as menace and atonement”?

I found the repetitious moments boring (too Prufrock) and the blue guitar theme less exciting, but the metaphorical work is exciting—just done with a medium I don’t particularly like. Some really good stuff in here.

[j · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title poem is Stevens working with a huge paintbrush on a canvas of unending sky, making massive sweeping motions. Totally cosmic and all-encompassing. Big, wriggling leviathan poetry. Just when you think you've got it, the thing flaps and flops out of your grasp. From light into shadow and back again and back again.

[Cal Barton]

Of men whose heaven is in themselves, // Or else whose hell, foamed with their blood / And the long echo of their dying cry, / A fate intoned, a death before they die, / The race that sings and weeps and knows not why.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Steven’s guitar strums mightily

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

The titular poem is certainly one of Stevens' best, and one which continues his project of interrogating both the craft of poetry/art and the constructedness of religion and gods. Other parts of the book do this as well, but the book, for me, is ultimately dragged down by the long and unrewarding poem "Owl's Clover." This poem fits perfectly with the book (and Stevens' continued) project, but it's certainly not Stevens' best longer poem, and coming after "Man with the Blue Guitar" makes the book seem exceptionally long and more difficult than it really is.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

O Homem da Viola Azul é uma profunda reflexão que, para além de retomar o simbolismo francês, poetiza sobre a sociedade distópica e soturna que o Homem tem vindo a criar desde a primeira revolução industrial - talvez antes? -, mundo no qual a realidade, verde, se sobrepõe à imaginação, azul. No fundo, é uma reinvocação de D. Quixote, enquanto quimera, e Sancho Pança, enquanto representante das «coisas como são». Um estilo refinadíssimo, típico de um mestre.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I am the man with the blue guitar.

I do not play things as they are."

http://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rc...

[Gerardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is an awesome poem.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

gewoon onsterfelijke gedichten

[Everett Minshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is worth reading.

[Descending Angel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of only 3 poems, but the title poem is one of Stevens most famous and the poem "The Men That Are Falling" is up there as one of my favourite I've read so far by Stevens.