ENGL 487
--English Capstone--
Romanticism:
The Long Two Centuries
(1798-2012)

"Wallace Stevens:
Collected Poems"
Page

 

    Last Updated: 3/2/12    


 



        
Wallace Stevens:

The Collected Poems (1954)

"As: the last plainness of a man who has fought / Against illusion . . . ."

Wallace Stevens' BINARIES:
    The world of Wallace Stevens' poetry has always been two, "things as they are" and "things imagined" [more simply put: reality vs. human ideas & artifice]. The dichotomy has been so constant that certain things are stock [ugh] symbols of the two realms. The moon, blue, the polar north, winter, music, poetry and all art: these consistently refer to [and some, indeed, are!] the realm of imagination, order, the ideal. The sun, yellow, the tropic south, summer, physical nature; these refer to, or symbolize [or rather, again, some =], the realm of reality, disorder, the actual. [. . .] From Harmonium to Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, the poetry is concerned with these two worlds, separately and in varying relation. The concern is made explicit in dust-jacket statements by Stevens; about Ideas of Order, which "attempts to illustrate the roles of the imagination in life, and particularly in [. . .] life at present"; about "The Man with the Blue Guitar," which "deals with the incessant conjunctioning between things as they are and things imagined."
        —Bernard Heringman, "Wallace Stevens: The Use of Poetry" (English Literary History 16.4 [Dec. 1949]: 325)

Edward Kessler, in The Images of Wallace Stevens (Rutgers UP, 1972), offers a quite similar set of oppositions: north vs. south / statue vs. wilderness / music vs. the sea / moon vs. sun / "domination of black" vs. colors. While the last pair is problematic, all the others slide rather niftily beneath Heringman's main binary of "imagination" vs. "real life," respectively.

Thus, a preliminary, "working" binary table might run as follows (to be expanded/amended, no doubt):

ART / ARTIFICE / IMAGINATION / IDEASREALITY / ACTUALITY / PHYSICALITY
(human) "Order"(non-human) "Disorder"
 Wilderness, the Sea
NorthSouth (especially the Tropics)
(Blue)[vivid] Colors (but/and Black?!)
WinterSummer
MoonSun
Art (especially Music) 
  
["Old Position"?? (sort of)][Romanticism?? (sort of)]
However, this is poetry, not a drugstore dream-symbol dictionary: be prepared for "things falling apart," the binaries collapsing & deconstructing themselves. (In sum, they're hardly "stock symbols." Rather, "these are merely instances" [Stevens, "Theory" (CP 87)]).

For instance: our first assigned poem, "Domination of Black," can fruitfully be read as a "cry" or "protest" by art (the "peacocks"–and Stevens' own poem, at last) against the stark reality of death (the "dark," the "hemlocks"). But then, the peacocks have "colorful" tails, too, deconstructing the binary table above. (Philosophically, one shouldn't be surprised by this: for, as the more astute ecocritics have reminded us, isn't human artifice part of "nature," too? More à propos of Steven's general "themes," there's also/always something ironic, even pathetic, about humankind's—er, peacocks'—artistic gestures: death is the veritable "real," after all.)

Wallace Stevens & ROMANTICISM:
Stevens has been traditionally grouped with T. S. Eliot et al. as an exemplar of "High Modernism." Indeed, given Stevens' obvious great regard for the French Symbolistes, for modern visual art (e.g., cubism), and his ostensible "deep symbolism" (I hate both words, in any discussion of literature), he is often cited as the prototypical example of the Modernist "ivory tower" poet, writing precious & pretentious obscure poetry with a haughty disregard for the "unwashed masses." Also, having read just a few of the assigned poems, you will have noticed a radical difference in tone between Stevens and the 19th-c. Romantics. If "Domination of Black" is about the painful consciousness of death, its tone must be characterized, then, as that of great understatement. As a stylist of "restraint" & "order," Stevens can easily be dubbed (like most Modernist poets) as a neo-classicist poet. (Again, one of Modernism's chief features was its rebellion against Romantic, and Victorian, excesses of emotion.)

HOWEVER—thematically, there is still much Romanticism in Stevens. While contemporary critics of Stevens (that is, New Critics, mostly) priviledged the "art/artifice" side of the binary above, the "nature" side of the binary is at least as important to the poet, I think (and Bly also thinks so, to no one's surprise). In sum, whichever "side" a critic takes in trying to pin down Stevens' ultimate position says more about the critic's own ideology than Stevens'. . . . Finally, in his later poems, especially, there is a conversational-yet-philosophical style (and loose blank verse) that seems to owe much to the influence of Wordsworth. (I wrote an undergraduate paper on this connection long ago, and I actually found some knowledegable Stevens scholars who had pointed out this very influence.) . . . This paragraph is only the beginning of such Stevens-&-ROM ruminations. One could also note WS's continued (and continual) privileging of "Poetry" (and the "Poet," and the "Imagination" [however qualified]); his blatant arationalism; his iconoclastic critique of religious institutions & metaphysical ideology; his . . . .

[A "quotable quote"?:] Whitman's main motive was to populate his poetic world with as many images and ideas as possible; Stevens, in stark contrast, desired the bare image, devoid as much as possible of human projections and ideology. (But he still used a hell of a lot of words trying to get there!)   --TCG



 

 StevensCP1.pdf::



—from Harmonium (1923/1931)::

** "Domination of Black" (8-)
    —One of the more straightforward of Stevens' "color symbolism" poems: the "black" of the title, the "night," and the "heavy hemlocks" (the latter, with "poisonous" connotations) pretty clearly represent death. (Hemlocks are also American pine trees; like many species thereof, they look dark, even black, from a distance [ergo SoDak's Black Hills].) The peacocks are life (and ultimately art/poetry) protesting death's eventuality (the "cry of the peacocks"; their "cry against the hemlocks"). (A relevant aside, I think: as a student once reminded me, if you listen to the peacocks' calls at the zoo, they sound as if they're yelling, "Help! Help! Help!")
    —Also noteworthy is the poem's quite restrained & understated Modernist tone. This isn't an emotional British Romantic wallowing in his/her fear of death (e.g., Keats). The closest we get to emotionalism is the finale: "I felt afraid. / And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.")
    —10/21/08: I just woke up from one of those anxiety dreams teachers sometimes have: yu' get to class (if yu' can find it), and it's a complete fiasco. In this dream, I showed up for this class, and I was late, I couldn't find my handouts—heck, I couldn't even find the lights to turn them on. "Great," I thought miserably, "This is perfect for teaching Stevens. I might as well start with 'Domination of Black.'"
** "The Snow Man" (9-)
    —Best read, I think, as one of Steven's "epistemological poems"—that is, it's about what we know about the real world, and how we (think we) know it. As in many of these poems, most of what we know is sheer human projection (and "imagination"), our natural (or more usually, socialized) inclination to hear "misery in the sound of the wind." The poem (apparently) claims that it's better "not to think" like that in the perception of natural phenomena, but rather, to "have a mind of winter"—which I read as being so much a part of the landscape/place/time that such projections are unnecessary. The last stanza is infamously obscure, but I read it as the attainment of a "Zen" consciousness (similar to the immersive "mind of winter") in which the subject-object dualism is erased completely. At last, to perceive the "Nothing that is not there" means to see what really is "there," without (again) the human "baggage" that we usually bring to our very environment.
* "Anecdote of Men by the Thousand" (51-)
    —Maybe one of Stevens' most assertive pronouncements on the importance of place (for Bly on this poem, see News 82-83). It also fits into what I've called his "epistemological" (or here, "ontological") position: "The soul . . . is composed / Of the external world."
    —Scholars have commented on Stevens' frequent use of Asian exoticism (a "Romantic" trait, by the way); here we have "men of the East" and "a woman of Lhassa" (the French spelling of Lhasa—the capital of Tibet). I haven't read a lot of recent Stevens criticism, but I can only assume that some postcolonialist critic has called him on his "Orientalism" (that is, co-opting & othering a continent & group of cultures that he really knows little about). . . . Other exotic images in the poem are the "toucans" and the "mandolines" (retaining the French spelling and assumedly the French pronunciation: "-leens").
** "The Apostrophe to Vincentine" (52-)
    —One of my first favorite Stevens poems—I memorized it one high-school summer. Not that I claimed to understand it ("just a cool love poem, right?"); I mostly just loved the music of the words. (To paraphrase some famous Stevens scholar, maybe we don't know what some of his poems are saying—but we're pretty sure that he's saying it well!)
    —But I still think it's, above all, a wonderful love poem. What qualifies this reading is Stevens' supposed "themes," & image schema, of "ideas vs. reality." "I figured you" immediately sets up the possibility that the narrator's image of Vincentine may well be a product of the mind, with "Monotonous earth" & "warm as flesh" (reality) being radically "colored" by idealism ("sky," "heavenly"). Then we have the color opposition of "white" (often representative of a "ghostly," vacuous idealism in Stevens) and "green" (for WS, usually young & fertile real life). In this poem, however, she is "whited green," and the final repetition of "heavenly" seems very positive in tone. Maybe in this poem the two have achieved some balance, a viable "marriage"?
    —Finally: I think "Brunette, / But yet not too brunette" is one of the coolest pair of lines ever written.
* "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" (59)
    —The poet playfully shocks the woman of "moral law" here by imagining an alternative "heaven," of hedonistic paganism. (Thus the reference to jazz—"Squiggling like saxophones"—evoking a music that, in WS's day, had connotations of a near-taboo sensuality.)
    —The opening statement, "Poetry is the supreme fiction," reminds me that, for Stevens, poetry (art & aesthetics) has taken the place of religion: "After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption" (Opus Posthumous 185).
    —You've probably noticed by now that WS is a compulsive alliterator: "Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince."
** "Depression Before Spring" (63)
    —Should the fact that WS's wife was blonde be even a legitimate point to introduce into any explication of this poem? (A more interesting question: how did this "dazzling" blonde feel about the narrator's apparent lusting after another woman [spring, that is, personified as a "queen" in "slipper green"]?!)
    —Unlike many of Stevens' poems, the "symbolism" is fairly straightforwardly archetypal here: the "cock" is the male principle (and by extension, male poet), calling for its "queen" to "rise" (for spring to come; cf. the "May Queen," etc.). But not yet, and therefore his depression: "no queen comes / In slipper green" (the color of fertility, rebirth). (A related reading, that might apply to many of the obscure females in Stevens' poems, is that he is [also] calling for his "muse" [and Jungian anima?].)
    —In terms of Stevens' sometimes amazing modernist realism, it's pretty imaginatively "dazzling" itself to compare a woman's flowing hair to "the spittle of cows / Threading the wind." The male/female duet are also embodied as birds, the male calling "ki-ki-ri-ki"; but no female "rou-cou-cou" answers. (While Stevens probably had no particular bird in mind—and he loved to make up nonsense sounds—the female call sounds dove- or pigeon-like [and moreover, has a quite maternal/womb(?!) "ooh" sound].)
** "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" (64)
    —Perhaps WS's most famous poem, but one I've read too many times to say much about. Often noted are the many tawdry little realistic details, which create a cognitive dissonance in the reader's mind when juxtaposed with the poem's more "poetic" moments (e.g., "Let be be finale of seem"). It's another poem about real "being," then, about "what really is," which includes death and the ephemerality of individual life: "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream." (The fact that this is one of the few WS poems that can be so briefly paraphrased probably explains why it is most high-school students' first—and perhaps only—exposure to Stevens. Though I doubt most 2ndary-ed. teachers are entirely aware of the shocking atheist-materialist philosophy here: you're lettin' students read a poem that denies an afterlife, and Christ as Lord?—since life's only "emperor" is death itself?!)
** "Disillusionment of Ten O'clock" (66)
    —One of WS's more straightforward "color-scheme-symbol" poems—with a strongly "Romantic" gist, besides. The first two lines describe a bourgeois existence that lacks real life and color ("haunted," "white"); such ghastly life is but a pale remove from an authentic life of the body (and even art ["dreams"?]). Interestingly, ll. 3-11 are both a list of colorful and exotic things, but also a negation of such simple & pleasurable sensations (and "dreams"): "None are . . . ."; "people are not going / To dream . . . ." The last four lines furnish a contrast to such a negative life, and one that (I assume) the poet applauds: "an old sailor, Drunk . . . Catches tigers / In red weather." This is a life of dreams, even (Romantic) art, with the wild animal, the wild(?) weather, and the color red—the color of blood, animality, emotion, heart, life—in great contrast to the empty ethereal "walking dead" inhabiting "Oxidia" (WS's term in "The Man with the Blue Guitar" for "banal" suburbia).
*** "Sunday Morning" (66-)
    —My favorite WS poem (or have I already claimed this elsewhere?!). Prosodically speaking, it's one of Steven's best latter-day incarnations of Wordsworth's marriage of vernacular-and-philosophical blank verse. Note also that WS was a great fan of Nietzsche, and it's not hard to hear the "pagan" (and anti-Christian) voice of (Mr. "God Is Dead") Zarathustra in this poem. Indeed, it is one of WS's most earnest & eloquent calls for living in the here & now, devoid of old ideologies:
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?   (2.2-7)
Likewise, earlier in the poem: "And shall the earth / Seem all the paradise that we should know?" WS's answer is yes. Maybe he doesn't want us to all regress to being naked pagan sun-worshippers, but he does (wishfully) prophesy a more—uh—solar-based future?!:
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.   (7.1-5)
What's left, then? Well, what's wrong with being left with "things as they are"? They're pretty awesome (intending the religious connotations of the word) themselves:
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.   (8.9-15)
What that ending darkness is should be clear to the reader by now. . . . (There's also the clever "theological" play, I think, on actual pigeons as contrasts to the etherealized Dove-as-Holy-Spirit.)
    —Besides Wordsworth, I noticed on this reading the shadow of Keats lying behind this poem. The last few lines of stanza 4—ending with the "swallow's wings"—reminds me of "Ode to Autumn"; and the first few lines of stanza 6 are obviously based on "Ode to a Grecian Urn." (As another Romantic angle, indeed, Stevens was one of the few Modernists who obviously enjoyed—and enjoyed imitating—the "sensualism" of Keats, & Tennyson, and Swinburne; indeed, early critics accused him of being a mere impressionist of the senses. [We wish he were that easy!])
* "Six Significant Landscapes" (73-)
    —Several of these "landscapes" are quite imagistic, and indicative of the influence of the haiku upon WS (and the modernists in general)—e.g., stanza 1, the last 3 lines of stanza 2, the last 2 lines of stanza 5). Speaking of imagism, the title word "Significant" is reminiscent of the "so much depends" of WCW's "The Red Wheelbarrow," and it implies the same question: "what is so important about these images?" (Note also how reminiscent the first 3 lines are to the purported imagism of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.")
    —The imagery of Stanzas 2 and 4 in toto, however, are closer to another major influence on WS, French sybmolisme, in which the images tend to fade, via metaphor (& "symbolism") into a vague suggestiveness. (Indeed, the goal of the foremost French symboliste, Mallarmé, was to make his poems as close to music as possible, leaving the reader with a "mere" mood or aura, a near erasure of the poem's semantics [verbal "meaning"].)
    —But I chose this poem because of stanza 6, of course, which could well have been included in the 20th-century section of Bly's anthology, as definitely a latter-day Romanticism:
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses—
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
*** "Anecdote of the Jar" (76)
    —Another of WS's more straightforward(?!) poems, at least in terms of the obvious binary of the "jar" vs. the "wilderness." But having taught this in lit-crit courses, I never cease to be amazed how well this main opposition can be read from a variety of critical approaches—feminism, Marxism, postcolonialism, ecocriticism. . . . However, if we are to accept WS's and his "major" critics' statements about his craft, we're almost forced to find here that central thematic battleground of human artifice versus the real world. But even with this limitation, it's fascinating how critical "horizons of expectation" have changed regarding this poem through the years: the first generation of scholars (New Critics, predominantly) came down on the side of "art": the jar is the "ontological artifact" that is the poem, and Stevens implies such creation to be a good thing. Later scholars, in contrast, have been much more willing to take the side of the "wilderness" (especially, as you might guess, postcolonialist & ecocritics, who read the human will-to-power suggested by the "jar" as a force much more sinister). I tend to side with the latter because of what I perceive to be the poet's tone, as evidenced in his word choices—especially "gray and bare." (And at last, the way any reader interprets the binary reveals his/her own unconscious allegiance to either the "old position" ["jar"] or the "new position" ["wilderness"]!?)
    —Final note: Tennessee was—and more importantly, was perceived as—an (even) much more rural place in Stevens' time; therefore—like the "Oklahoma" of "Earthy Anecdote"—it was readily connotative of the "wilderness." (But the specific setting has also led to conjectures about the jar being a container for good ol' Tennessee moonshine! . . .)
* "Theory" (86-)
    —Stevens' ontology might be summarized via the first line: "I am what is around me." The poem's middle six lines exemplify this bald statement via a "duchess" acquiring her identity, as it were, via her surroundings (with lines 3-4 being eminently quotable: "One is not duchess / A hundred yards from a carriage").
    —However: to say that "Women [especially] understand this" might make the feminist wonder whether WS understands women?!
    —The final line is one of many apparently lame, even non sequitur, finales in WS's corpus. Of course, "These are merely instances" actually fits the empirical/inductive argument that WS is putting forth, that each individual (and his/her related "objects") exemplifies the truth of the poem's first line through an endless metonymy of place associations. But it also seems playfully "anti-poetic," perhaps a jab at the formalist privileging of "organic unity." (Thus one might claim that WS anticipates the postmodern "anti-" or "impure poem" [the latter phrase first applied to the 1960's poetry of Frank O'Hara].)
*** "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (92-)    [pictured: Common Grackle:]    
    —OR: WHY THIS POEM ISN'T ABOUT DEATH?!—Another poem I've taught too often to want to say much about. [Oops. I wrote this sentence an hour ago, and I'm still at it!] Lots of critical readings emphasize the influence of imagism & the haiku on the poem, although—read section 1 again—what a strange imagism it is! Others have concentrated upon the "black" color of the bird and read it as a "simple" poem about death's eventuality (a reading that actually works sorta well). Some scholars have brought up the influence of Nietzsche and thus read the ostensibly radical disjunction between the sections as exemplifying Nietzsche's "perspectivism." I guess I'm in a rut right now, and would still prefer the "human/ideas vs. life/reality" thing; but of course reality or "life" includes death, and this terrible truth can readily be perceived (too facilely, to be sure) to be the poem's gist. (Or is there no gist, no "whole?" And so is this a "joke" poem of sorts, for the critics?)
    —Ornithological note: first of all, blackbirds aren't crows. Secondly, the two Icterid blackbirds that WS most commonly saw, in the eastern U.S., are the Common Grackle and the Red-winged Blackbird. But given the poet's presumed usual Connecticut suburban environment, it's likely that he has most in mind the grackle, that ubiquitous purplish-black lawn-walker and squawker, with the long tail. (But then, neither species is a notably fine "whistler" [section 5], or usually sits in pine [cedar] trees [section 13].)
    —Section I: See my general notes above. But doesn't that one "eye" seem quite sinister? Or is this my human projection, that the "blackbird" would critique. . . . Also we are introduced to the motif of whiteness/cold/snow. Following my "Stevens-Made-Easy" binary table, this should represent the barrenness of human ideation. We'll see. . . . (But the frustrating thing, as with most of these binaries: the cold & snow also evokes the reality of death; and so . . . .)
    —Section II: A new "perspective," no doubt. Indeed, a wonderful intrapsychic poem, by itself. (And it's the occasional section like this that militates against reducing the "whole" poem—or the "blackbird" as trope—to "death," or whatever—and begs for a more "perspectivist"/"cubist" [or even atomistic"] reading.)
    —Section III: More "death" stuff here (and again, is WS just teasing us?). We have "black" and "autumn"—and all things/beings are but "small part[s] of the pantomime," of the game of life (which ends in "black," and "winter").
    —Section IV: "A boy and a girl and a—bird. How romantic!" Seriously, one of my favorite stanzas in Stevens. Teaching this poem to ENGL 101 students, and following the easy "death" reading, I remember telling them something like "yes, even in a human love relationship, death is still part of it all." On one level, this is pretty "heavy." But I also think right now that I was "full of it."
    —Section V: Like the second section, one would have to be pretty ingenious to read "death" into this. I see it as a pretty straightforward commentary on aesthetics, on the distinction between our immediate perceptions and our subsequent memories of art (or of the "beauty" in anything).
    —Section VI: Hard, cold, dark stuff here: "Icicles," "barbaric glass," the "shadow of the blackbird." I'm a-scared! (Even the "indecipherable cause" seems sinister?)
    —Section VII: Steven's main thematic binary seems pretty clear here: we have these ascetics or aesthetes ("thin men") who live in the world of ideas & idealism, as they imagine "golden birds." (I can't but recall the artificial "gold" bird of WB Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium.") In stark contrast, the blackbird ushers in reality again, walking "around the feet / Of the women about you." (Elsewhere, Stevens consciously pairs the oriole against the crow [another black bird]—the gaudy singer versus the mundane squawker—as a marvelous twin-metaphor for his main binary obsession. But even this oppositional pair is deconstructed: "Crow is realist. But, then, / Oriole, also, may be realist" [CP 154].) . . . Oh, I recently discovered that Haddam is an actual city in Connecticut. But WS no doubt chose the name in part for its "exotic"/Middle-Eastern sound, giving the "thin men" more other-worldly overtones.
    —Section VIII: Similar to the fifth section, as a commentary on aesthetics. (By this point, it is probably laughable to repeat my old reading here: "Yes, death 'is involved' in this knowledge, too!")
    —Section IX: Hmmm . . . to quote the old Lakota saying, "We are all related"?!
    —Section X: The "bawds of euphony"—literally, of "good sounds"—are optimistic idealists, I presume. But the "green light" of all that good ol' ever-flourishing life still includes—gasp—the "blackbird," with all the anti-idealist resonations that I've suggested? ("No! Say it ain't so!")
    —Section XI: I read this as another version of the sixth section, as redolent of "death" (or the "Real"): "glass," "fear," "shadow," "death." The "fear" of the fellow in the "coach" seems related to those of certain peacocks we've read about.
    —Section XII: The last two sections do rather beg for a "death-as-reality" reading. Sure, you could read this section as pure imagism, or as natural inevitability, or whatever. I like to think it means, "Life goes on. And death is a 'part' of it."
    —Section XIII: Times of day, and seasons, as ending & death, and also as always imminent in life? "It was evening [end of life] all afternoon [even earlier in life, in middle age?]. / It was snowing [people were dying] / And it was going to snow [and people will keep dying?!]." We end with the "blackbird" sitting in "the cedar-limbs." (See my comment on another fir tree, the hemlock, in "Domination of Black." Cedars, too, look pretty black from a distant. Moreover, as a student once reminded me, cedar wood is, or was, common in casket-making!) . . . But I also realize that all these "death" interpretations are pretty sophomoric and limited. I am almost tempted to start from scratch, and view the whole thing (for starters) as thirteen separate imagistic exercises, some of which are pretty pure "Japanese-painting" imagism, others of which deal with certain characteristic binaries in Stevens that can be traced throughout his corpus.
    My old poem, based on Stevens' "13 Ways":
    LOOKING AT THIRTEEN BLACKBIRDS CONFUSED BY
        GLOBAL WARMING AND CAUGHT IN A SNOWSTORM
        IN VERMILLION, SD, 27 NOVEMBER 2001

dead.

froze. dead.

            dead.

    dead.

dead.

dead.

        dead. dead.

            dead.

    dead.

still moving? no. dead.

dead.

—from Ideas of Order (1935/1936)::

* "How To Live. What To Do" (125-)
    —Following the binary schema suggested at the beginning, the first two stanzas here pretty clearly establish an opposition of the "moon" as the human realm of idealism & imagination versus the sheer reality of the "sun." The two humans, under the moon, reckon an "heroic height"; they "had left the flame-freaked[!] sun / To seek a sun of fuller flame." But in the last two stanzas, such lofty idealism is confronted with real life again, a huge "bare" rock. What, no fine poetic "crested image," "No chorister, nor priest"? Nope. They're left with just the wind making an "heroic sound / Joyous and jubilant and sure." (This is a different type of "heroism," to be sure.)
** "The Brave Man" (138)
    —Following our main dichotomies (real life/nature vs. human ideas & illusions), the sun is the "bright light" of reality, putting an end to our "night thoughts" (be they artistic or otherwise), versus night's "gloomy eyes and human "Fears." Instead, the sun "walks without meditation, / That brave man."
    —However, for years, I've read this poem in an almost opposite fashion, as a Jungian intrapsychic allegory. In this reading, the sun equals ego consciousness (Bly's "day consciousness"), the psyche's central complex of awareness that, when active, represses the other aspects of the psyche (i.e., the unconscious, or Bly's "night consciousness"—the poem's "dark forms"). But details in the poem make this interpretation (even) less satisfactory than the first reading I've offered.
    —Literary history note: Stanza three ("The good stars . . . .") seems influenced by Blake's stanza from "The Tyger," "When the stars threw down their spears . . . ." In the context of Blake's own private mythology, the "stars" are inimical forces, too, representatives of the "old position" and (unhealthy) traditional order (Blake's "Urizen"). (I'm assuming my first reading in claiming the stars to be similarly connotative in the Stevens poem.)

 

 StevensCP2.pdf::



—from The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937)::

Pablo Picasso's The Old Guitarist,

inspiration for Stevens' "The Man with the Blue Guitar"

(see especially section 15 of said poem)

** "The Man with the Blue Guitar" (165-)
    —The "man" & his "blue guitar" = one of Stevens' most famous formulations of the poet/artist; and it's no coincidence (Cf. "Peter Quince," "Mozart, 1935" etc.) that our "man" is associated with music. (It's also WS's most prominent use of "blue" for art & the imagination.)
    —HOWEVER—like WW's "Song of Myself"—it's impossible to read this poem as a sequential whole; any general "gist" must be a collage of what one can make of the various sections. (The analogue of WS's poetry and impressionist—or cubist—visual art may have been overblown by WS's early critics, but in instances such is this, they're helpful?!)
    —WS's main thematic tension is established immediately in section 1, with "things exactly as they are" versus the fact that "'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are." ("I do not like green eggs and ham!" [Sorry.]) Even in portraying humankind, the artist can only "reach . . . almost to man" (2.6).
    —Much of Section 3 smacks of (a critique of) the "old position" (à la Wordsworth's "murder to dissect"): ""To lay his brain upon the board"; "To tick it, tock it, turn it true . . . ."
    —Section 5 is interesting, in its initial critique of artistic idealism (& Romanticism?): "Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry"; and then its call for an aesthetics of the "here & now" (though the argument is more complicated than that): "There are no shadows in our sun . . . . The earth, for us, is flat and bare. . . . Poetry / Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns . . . ." (This last is a crucial notion we've already encountered in WS. However, by "complicated," I mean that the speaker[s] here are the man w/ the blue guitar's audience, and many of the other statements by these "people" are obviously ironized by WS, and thus do not necessarily represent his own thoughts on the matter.)
    —From what I've said (and steered you towards) so far, let me now just quote more "great"/resonant lines from the poem; ask yourself how they "fit":
It is the sun that shares our works.
The moon shares nothing. It is a sea.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The sun no longer shares our works

And the earth is alive with creeping men,
Mechanical beetles never quite warm? (7.1-2, 5-7)

I know my lazy, leaden twang
Is like the reason in a storm;

And yet it brings the storm to bear. (8.9-11)

And the color, the overcast blue
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The color like a thought that grows
Out of a mood . . . . (9.1, 7-8)

As I strum the thing, do I pick up
That which momentously declares

Itself not to be I and yet
Must be. It could be nothing else. (12.9-12)

The pale intrusions into blue
Are corrupting pallors . . . . (13.1-2)

A candle is enough to light the world.

It makes it clear. Even at noon
It glistens in essential dark.

At night, it lights the fruit and wine,
The book and bread, things as they are,

In a chiaroscuro where
One sits and plays the blue guitar. (14.8-14)

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. (15.1-7)

Try reading the following "monster" as the reality/nature half of the binary (and "myself" as the artist/poet):
That I may reduce the monster to
Myself, and then may be myself

In face of the monster, be more than part
Of it, more than the monstrous player of

One of its monstrous lutes, not be
Alone, but reduce the monster and be,

Two things, the two together as one,
And play of the monster and of myself,

Or better not of myself at all . . . . (19.1-9)

What is there in life except one's ideas.
Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Good air. Poor pale, poor pale guitar . . . (20.1-2, 8)

A substitute for all the gods:
This self, not that gold self aloft,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
One's self and the mountains of one's land,

Without shadows, without magnificence,
The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone. (21.1-2, 10-12)

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

Its true appearances there, sun's green,
Cloud's red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?

From these it takes. Perhaps it gives,
In the universal intercourse. (22 [entire])

The end of section 22 (above) comes close, I think, to Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey," when he speaks "of all the mighty world / Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, / And what perceive . . . ."
A few final solutions, like a duet
With the undertaker: a voice in the clouds,

Another on earth, the one a voice
Of ether, the other smelling of drink,

The voice of ether prevailing . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . the voice
In the clouds serene and final, next

The grunted breath serene and final,
The imagined and the real, thought

And the truth, Dichtung und Wahrheit, all
Confusion solved, as in a refrain

One keeps on playing year by year,
Concerning the nature of things as they are. (23.1-5, 7-14)

I'm pretty sure that Stevens considers this "solution" to be "imaginary," a product of the "voice of ether." (Wahreit means "truth" in German; Dichtung, significantly, means both "poetry" and "fiction"—as in WS's notion of poetry as the "supreme fiction.")
The world washed in his imagination
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams
Of inaccessible Utopia. (26.1, 9-10)

I am a native in this world
And think in it as a native thinks,

Gesu, not native of a mind
Thinking the thoughts I call my own . . . . (28.1-4)

. . . Oxidia, banal suburb
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ecce, Oxidia is the seed
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Oxidia is the soot of fire,
Oxidia is Olympia. (30.9, 13, 15-16)

The bubbling sun will bubble up,

Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek.
The employer and employee will hear

And continue their affair. The shriek
Will rack the thickets. There is no place,

Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,
In the museum of the sky. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of things as they are. (31.4-10, 15-16)

[(Neo-)Romantic alert:]
Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space, Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed. (32.9-10)

Now the final section (33) complete; like "Sunday Morning" and WS's other "best" (or most characteristic, at least) poems, this one leaves the reader, unsettled and alone, in this world; but it does end with an affirmation(?) of art—the "imagined" final pair of images ("aviled" means defiled or abased, BTW):
That generation's dream, aviled
In the mud, in Monday's dirty light,

That's it, the only dream they knew,
Time in its final block, not time

To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
Here is the bread of time to come,

Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be

Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except

The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

. . . My (later) list of key sections: 1 / 3 / 7 / 17 / 19 / 21-23 / 30-33

—from Parts of a World (1942)::

** "The Latest Freed Man" (204-)
    —Stevens ( or the speaker) is once again "Tired of the old descriptions of the world," complaining that "'I suppose there is / A doctrine to this landscape. Yet, having just / Escaped from the truth [irony!; = the 'old descriptions,' in part Bly's 'old position'], the morning is color and mist, / Which is enough." As we've seen in much of Stevens, this is, espistemologically speaking, both a limiting and a cleansing of perceptual truths and possibilities (a cleansing of the perceptual palate, if you will). And characteristically, the sun is involved: "It was how the sun came shining into his room: To be without a description of to be . . . . It was how he was free. It was how his freedom came. / It was being without description . . . . It was everything being more real, himself / At the centre of reality, seeing it. / It was everything bulging and blazing and big in itself. . . ." (Note, finally, that Stevens' is no simple "naturism," since all this depends upon the human consciousness [phenomenology]—though Wordsworth pretty much knew that himself?!)
** "Of Modern Poetry" (239-)
    —Stevens employs "actor" as metaphor for the artist/poet several times in his corpus. Here, the "actor is / A metaphysician in the dark." In its general gist, this is another poem of sweeping away the "old" dogmas, and of seeing anew (and/or seeing that plain ol' "seeing" is a projective act of the psyche):
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
                                    Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
(In contrast, modern art/poetry must get beyond the "past," the "script"—in part by knowing its "place"::)
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . The poem of the act of the mind.

—from Transport to Summer (1947)::

** "No Possum, No Sop, No Taters" (293-)
    —If "Depression before Spring" was supposed to be depressing, this is much more so, a veritable "dark night of the soul," the language of which reminds me much of T. S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men."
    —What is missing? That heart of "reality," the sun: "He is not here, the old sun," and the resulting landscape is bleak: "the broken stalks / Have arms without hands[!]." Such a setting/feeling/mood is an epistemological "evil," one might say, and thus the coda, and the un-Stevens-like demonizing of another species (crows gathering in "malice," as if they were supernatural Fates):
It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.

The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye . . .

One joins him there for company,
But at a distance, in another tree.

* "Men Made Out of Words" (355-)
    —I must confess to not being able to remember why I thought this poem was "cool" enough, in my memory, to assign it. It may have been the great statement, "Life consists / Of propositions about life." (And they very title, of course.)
** "Credences of Summer" (372-)
    —In contrast to the various WS poems of "depression" we've read, and especially "Esthétique du Mal," this poem can be read as one of the brighter, more "manic," lights in WS's corpus, with several great passages that are almost a Romantic naturism—of "green's green apogee" (3.2)—BUT with (of course) WS's philosophically enforced limitations. (Note the implications of the "Credences"—beliefs—of the title.)
    —The "BUT" includes WS's characteristic drive to see "reality" itself:
Postpone the anatomy of summer, as
The physical pine, the metaphysical pine.
Let's see the very thing and nothing else.
Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.

Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor. (2.1-7)

    —Another typical Romantic gesture—the "musical" ideal of a "Pure rhetoric of a language without words" (4.10).
    —Section 7 approaches the "welcome-the-season" effusion of "Ploughing on Sunday":
. . . The trumpet [of morning] cries
This is the successor of the invisible.

This is the substitute in stratagems
Of the spirit. This, in sight and memory,
Must take its place, as what is possible
Replaces what is not. (8.4-9)
And the coda (with final echoes from Keats) provides a temporary antidote to the mal of "EsthŽtique." Oh, to be
Part of the mottled mood of summer's whole,

In which the characters speak because they want
To speak, the fat, the roseate characters,
Free, for a moment, from malice and sudden cry,
Complete in a completed scene, speaking
Their parts as in a youthful happiness. (10.10-15)

--The "SILVER TREE" outside Andrews Hall (officially titled "Breach"[!], by Roxy Paine, 2004

[photo: TCG, 2006])--

--Steven's central philosophical problem/"theme" of "Imagination" & "Reality" emblematized in real life (er, sort of?)--

 

 StevensCP3.pdf::




To the Top

Back to the NOTES page

  Course Syllabus/Schedule

  TCG's LitCrit (Resource) Page

  TCG's "Home" Page--including links to other of my LIT pages

TCG's ENGL 487 Class NOTES Page

< http://incolor.inebraska.com/tgannon/EnglCapstN487.html >