Stevens and the Dangerous Mirror

　 The human imagination, the ability to perceive another kind of reality made purely of thought, has always been the muse of artists and writers alike. Poets especially prize this human ability to imagine and create because it is the essence of their work, both for the poet nad the reader. However, Wallace Stevens admired the imagination more than anyother contemporary writer and poet. In Wallace Steven's article titled Imagination as Value, he is writing this in opposition to Pascal's claim that imagination is the deceptive element of man. Steve's disagrees with that notion, he believes that imagination is what makes man productive. Man makes sense of the world around him through the active exercise of imagination. Therefore each man understands the world differently. I think the poem "Blanche McCarthy" conveys this idea. In the first line of the poem Steven's writes, "Look in the terrible mirror of the sky And not in this dead glass, which can reflect". Steven's refers to the world as a mirror beacuse man views the world with his own personal imagination so in order for man to understand the world he must look in to himself for his imagination.We must look to ourselves in order to find the answers of the world. The next line of the poem is only logical, he writes, "And not in this dead glass, which can reflect". Man looking inward for imagination and understanding the world is quite dangerous. There is a great fear of man not looking toward himself for the answers but rather looking at himself for the answers. If man looks at himself, like he looks in a mirror, for answers regarding the order of the world man becomes self-centered and arrogant. For this fear is why Stevens commands us not to look at ourselves as we look in a mirror, to see man's own reflection. Stevens wants man to look past the reflectin and to look in himself to find the answers in our own imagination.

Poetry: False and Circular

Wallace Stevens directly addresses the nature of poetry in his poem “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman.” “Poetry,” he begins, “is the supreme fiction.” He presents the scenario in which we take the “moral law,” presumably human morality, and “make a nave of it,” or build it into a structure like the nave of a church and make it like institutionalized religion. We then make the nave into a “haunted heaven,” so we make an artificial heaven, and even one that is “haunted”—sublime and feared by humans. A result of this would be that “the conscience is converted into palms,” possibly a play on “psalms,” so the conscience becomes the religious guidebook, in place of the traditional book of Psalms. This is corroborated by his next words, which likens this transformation to “windy citherns hankering for hymns”: a cithern is an instrument similar to a lute, and it yearns to play hymns, which are similar to psalms.

Yet, Stevens remarks that one can “take / The opposing law” and the same effect would occur. One can take this opposing law and make a “peristlyle,” which is a row of columns surrounding a court, and “project a masque / Beyond the planets,” or make it be a mask that extends far out into the heavens. Just like the first scenario in which an abstract concept was made into a nave, an impressive building structure, and built into a heaven, so too here, something is built into a peristyle, an impressive structure, and reaches into the distance of the universe. However, in both scenarios, there is a structure that lacks a central core; they both consist of boundaries, but the center is arbitrary. In this second scene, “our bawdiness,” of indecent humor, will be “indulged at last” and will be “equally converted into palms.” While our conscience turns into “windy citherns,” our bawdiness is found in a state of “[s]quiggling,” which is wilder than “hankering,” and “like saxophones,” which is louder than citherns. Nevertheless, our conscience and bawdiness, opposites, both are converted into palms, possibly representing our religious guide, as Stevens states: “And palm for palm… we are where we began.”

So what is poetry, Stevens asks, if not for an artificial construction that employs physical words, yet does not correspond with anything beyond it? We can play with words and arrive at the same conclusion. We can develop our moral or amoral tendencies and create religious language from it that can be used for worship, so is there actual truth? The fiction of poetry is that anything can be framed and packaged into words that do not represent the original thing in itself.

The next part of the poem juxtaposes the earthly with the sublime. The “flagellants,” individuals who flog themselves, are described as “well-stuffed” and “[s]macking their muzzy bellies in parade.” However, their grotesque description is framed within the lofty “planetary scene” and they are “[p]roud of such novelties of the sublime.” The tensioned relationship between these two models, described in made-up words as ‘tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,” causes “a jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.” Stevens concludes with the use of alliteration, repeating the words “widows,” “wince,” and “wink” in close proximity to each other. He says that the flagellants will cause themselves to be whipped, which will make widows wince. But “fictive things,” i.e. products of the imagination, such as poetry, “wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.” I am not exactly sure what these last lines mean, but it seems like Stevens attempts to show the circularity of poetry, expressed by his rehashing of similar sounding words, for poetry surrounds an idea but does not actually correspond to it or verily reflect it.

In “Imagination as Value,” Stevens quotes Pascal, who says that imagination is “the deceptive element in man, the mistress of error and duplicity…being most often false, it gives no sign of its quality and indicates in the same way both the true and the false” (133). Stevens seems to agree in this poem about the duplicity of imagination, for it can lead one in opposite directions. While Pascla criticizes imagination for having this ability, Stevens seems to be glorifying it for exactly that. He seems awe-inspired by the endlessness of poetry.

Grand Imagination

Wallace Stevens did not look at poetry as simply poetry, rather, poets were entrusted with a greater task. In the chapter, “Imagination as value,” Lucy Beckett asserts that fellow Harvard graduate George Santayana had a profound effect on Wallace Stevens and his work. It comes as no surprise, then, that Stevens agreed with much of Santayana’s literary philosophy. One of Santayana’s philosophies refers to the role of the poet. He writes:

Where poetry rises from its elementary and detached expressions in rhythms, euphemism, characterization and story-telling, and comes to the consciousness of its highest function, that of portraying the ideals of experience and destiny, then the poet becomes aware that he is essentially a prophet, and either devotes himself to the loving expression of the religion that exists, or like Lucretius or Wordsworth, to the heralding of one that he believes to be possible (26).

By elevating the poet to the role of a prophet, Santayana gestures to the responsibility poets have towards their readers. Moreover, it suggests that poets have the ability to portray the “ideals of experience and destiny.” Understanding this underlying motivation is useful if we turn to Wallace Stevens’ “The Man with the Blue Guitar.”

Although a painting by Picasso inspired “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Stevens gestures to an important underlying issue. The man with the guitar is a symbol of acceptance and self-realization. The man has a “blue guitar” and does not “play things as they are.” In fact, things change when played on the blue guitar. Still his audience wants him to play things as they are. So this man sagely states, “I cannot bring a world quite round/Although I patch it as I can.” But the man is not necessarily resigned, but simply accepting.

Beckett explains that Stevens’ artfulness as a poet comes from this greater responsibility as delineated by Santayana. She asserts,

It is precisely towards the conviction such words used to carry that Stevens moves with due and elaborate care both in his poetry and in his prose. Within the convolutions of the passage above lurks the proposition that the freedom to create significance, a commonplace of perception and discussion in the aesthetic sphere, can be related to the freedom from which a man may choose to create the significance of his own life (45).

This context is important when looking at the following lines in the poem: “For a moment final, in the way/ 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.” Within these lines, Stevens elevates the poem into philosophical discourse. Reaching this epiphany is the means in which the narrator of the poem creates significance in his life. When he later equates himself with the guitar, he has made what is insignificant to others, significant to himself.

Stevens asks, “what, then, is it to live in the mind with the imagination, yet not too near to the fountains of its rhetoric, so that one does not have a consciousness only of grandeurs, of incessant departures from the idiom and of inherent altitudes?” It is precisely this question that motivates his works. He seeks a higher meaning in his poetry because he places great emphasis on human imagination and its connection with rhetoric.

The Imagination of Stevens

When I was in elementary school, my teachers always told me to use my imagination and “engage my brain” while fulfilling the various tasks they assigned me, no matter if they involved writing an essay or constructing a diorama depicting my ideal house on Mars. However, my teachers never truly let me use my imagination to achieve my visions, because they always directed my energies toward achieving a specific assignment. By following these instructions, I followed their vision of what the end result of my labors would be, rather than on creating the real-world embodiment of the visions I saw in my mind.

When I started college classes, their emphasis on using critical thinking to further my intellectual growth and understand the material my professors assigned to me gave me a completely new way of using my imagination to broaden my understanding of my world. No longer were books mere words to read and plot points to memorize, but now they were tales that I could evaluate whether I liked them or not, with characters and events that could teach me lessons. When I read Wallace Stevens’ article, “Imagination as Value”, he helped me understand that when I used my imagination to aid my academic progress, it enabled me to think in-depth about the information I was required to process. Furthermore, learning how to engage in my own rich imaginative inner life enabled me to use my own thoughts and ideas to interpret the books and essays I encountered in class. In Stevens’ essay, he makes the point that “the imagination is the liberty of the mind… The imagination is the only genius. It is intrepid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction” (Stevens 138). When my imagination is my primary means of deriving an abstract idea from the chaos that arises out of many different sources of information being presented at the same time, my ability to make sense of the disorder is boundless.

Stevens goes on to describe imagination’s role in our everyday lives, making the point that each person’s world is unique to their self-contained thoughts. For example, he states, “A man in Paris does not imagine the same sort of thing that a native of Uganda imagines. If each could transmit his imagination to the other… what word would the Parisian find to forestall his fate and what understanding would the Ugandan have of his incredible delirium?” (140). In his essay, Stevens answers his own question by explaining that “If we live in the mind, we live with the imagination… concerned with the extent of artifice within us and, almost parenthetically, with the question of its value” (141). In other words, the only task we must achieve when developing our imaginative abilities is to build our own inner worlds, and our own mental models for how to view the material world.

Stevens provides an example of his answer to the question of how an individual only needs their own internal mental environment to create tools for making sense of their world in his poem, “Final Soliloquy of The Interior Paramour”. In the third and fourth stanzas of his poem, he says, “Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,/ A knowledge, that arranged the rendezvous. Within its vital boundary, in the mind. We say G-d and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark”. In this poem, Stevens tells his readers that the way a person can capture the power of their imagination is to let go of any previous allegiance they might have to ideas outside the realm of their own paradigm. With this poem, he places imagination on the same scale as the Divine, connoting to his readers that the highest achievement they can aspire to is to use their imagination to create their world.

The Mind is a Cold Place

Stevens’ exploration of the imagination, in his essay “Imagination as Value,” and its function and importance is an obvious theme that comes across in much of his poetry. Stevens, a poet of ideas, often deals with just that – our ideas, our thoughts and imagination and their relationship with reality. For Stevens, reality is the product of the imagination as it creates our world. As he says, “the truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them."

With this in mind, it is difficult to read Stevens’ poetry without understanding it as a metaphor for the imagination and mind. Even in his poems which seem to be talking about a specific subject other than the imagination, it is often obvious that the objects or topics are alluding to the ideas of imagination, mind, and reality. Such as in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” This post will be focusing on “The Snow Man” and its relationship to the imagination, mind, and reality.

Stevens begins the poem by setting up a winter scene with “frost and the boughs” and “pine-trees crusted with snow.” The first line reads, “One must have a mind of winter,” and can be interpreted in different ways. When I hear the word winter, I envision freshness and a sea of white; a mind of winter, therefore indicating a mind that is white like a blank slate. One must remove his previous thoughts and notions, and start fresh and anew.

But what must one have a fresh outlook for? Stevens continues, that one must have this “mind of winter” in order to regard the harsh and cold attributes of winter (which he depicts in detail) and “not to think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind.” In order to remove oneself from any association with misery, one must clear his mind and have an objective, winter-like outlook. Only a snow man who has “been cold a long time,” and is used to the bitter cold can disregard it to perceive an objective view of reality.

Stevens’ interweaves this message in the poem by beginning with us, with the “one” of the poem, watching the winter scene, as our mind stirs with the cold and miserable connotations of winter. However, gradually we are stripped of that separation between “us” and the snow man, and we become one with the snow man, beginning to see the world through his eyes. We become able to perceive the cold of the winter, through his skin, without the feelings of discomfort a human faces with the cold. To perceive the winter scene objectively, we must have a mind of a snow man, and only then can we perceive the reality of it.

Having read Steven’s essay on imagination and taking into consideration his final point “that the imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos,” I also understand the poem as follows:

In order to break through the chaos in the chaotic world we live in, we must clear our minds of what we have learned or expect and use only our imagination to guide us. The world is a “cold” and “shagged with ice” kind of place, but we must remove these perceptions so we can view the world and our reality as a positive place shaped by our imagination.

Nurturing life through imagination

There is a marvelous music video for the Lily Allen’s song “LDN”. (See it here: http://new.music.yahoo.com/videos/LilyAllen/LDN--44680579). The premise of the video is that nothing is as it seems on the surface. The video shows her looking at a piece of candy, but then removes a screen to reveal it is really a cigarette butt. There is also a scene of a young boy helping a woman with grocery bags but really he steals her wallet. The list continues. However, this sort of world and these images echo when reading Steven’s views on the imagination as interpreter of life. Just as Allen wears rose-colored glasses in the video, so too does the imagination provide humanity with rose-colored glasses.

The imagination, according to Stevens, enables man to keep living. It is “the only clue to reality” (Imagination as value, 137), the only thing that gives the mind power “over the possibilities of things” (136). Though the music video alters this point, it emphasizes the idea of the imagination giving shape to reality.

Exploring the idea of the imagination, Stevens compares his imagination to a candle in his poem “Valley Candle”. As a symbolist poet, every image bears deeper meaning, beyond the superficial word. Writing that his “candle burned alone in an immense valley,” (1) the reader imagines a flickering flame, the only fleck of light in the valley. Stevens’ candle, his imagination, feels surrounded by the natural world of the valley. Indeed, the natural world does not just surround the candle but “beams of the huge night converged upon” (2) the candle, attempting to drown its tender flame. Stevens’ use of the word “night” is the opposite of a candle. Night represents darkness and uncertainty. The candle provides light and clarity.

The coupling of” night” with “candle” is a perfect pairing. The night is the vast unknown, the wide reaching depths of nature and the mind. A candle is what allows a person to make sense of that unknown, to bring light and understanding to a confusing situation. The candle provides “the only clue to reality,” the reality of the dark valley.

In the third line of his poem, Stevens’ writes that there is also wind in this valley. The wind blows into the valley to rescue the candle’s luminance. The “beams” “converged” on the light “until the wind blew” (3), to strength it. Though this strengthening seems counterintuitive (since wind usually extinguishes a candle), in this line the wind drives away the beams of night to allow the flame to breathe oxygen and continue burning. A slight gust will cause a candle’s flame to bounce back, strong and better than before. It provides a renewed burst of light.

The second stanza of the poem reiterates the idea of the night encroaching on the candle, but this time Stevens uses the word “image” to refer to the candle. The word “image” carries with it the association of art. Art, in all of its forms, is powerful. Art is the free expression of the imagination, the entity that allows man to experience, fully, life’s possibilities. Before the “beams of the huge night” (4) overpower the light, the image, the imagination, the second wind swoops in to resuscitate and protect the fragile spark of imagination.

With a little push, the imagination flourishes, stronger than ever. With just a small prod by Stevens, a gentle message is sent to humanity: to nurture the imagination through the creation of art, which will ignite and illuminate the world.

Your Responses to the Blog Posts

I thought you might be interested to know which blog posts received attention from your fellow writers in the first paper. Coming in to this, I thought that a small number of the more controversial posts would attract the most responses, but in reality the results were very evenly spread out--so evenly in fact that only two of the blog posts received a second response. In other words, each of you responded to a different post in your first paper, except for two of you, who wrote about the same posts as someone else. Ilana and Sarit's posts were the two that were responded to by more than one student.

In terms of the subject matter, I was pleased that Joyce and Stein received almost exactly the same number of responses.

The class average for grades was about a B+.

A Clarification of Imagination

Wallace Stevens is focused on the imagination, reality, and the interaction between the two in his works. He often takes a very philosophical view on how the world has changed and lines have been blurred. One gray area that is of particular interest to Stevens is that of reality and imagination. The way we are able to come to a conclusion about reality is through our imaginations. We cannot live without our imaginations, because in a sense they are our filters that help us to process reality, and reconcile the formed reality with the world around us. Once people have gained a certain comfort level with the imagination it becomes a part of the their definition of normal (“Imagination as value” 145-146). The effect of this premise is best described by Stevens in “Imagination as value” when he writes, “The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal,” (153). By Wallace Stevens presenting the imagination in this way, he shows the personal aspect, subjectivity, and variability of the imagination. Everyone's experiences are different as are their perceptions and interpretations, therefore affecting their view of the imagination and the world around them.

Stevens uses these concepts as themes within his poetry. One such example would be in the poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar”. Here Stevens utilizes dichotomies that raise questions in order to show the difference in spectrum that a person can garner from a difference in imagination. An example of a dichotomy occurs when Stevens writes, “And all their manner, right and wrong, // And all their manner, weak and strong?” (134). The juxtaposition of “right and wrong” and “weak and strong” serves to show that either can be perceived based on an experience, but both can be correct in their assumption. This fact that both are possible and true exemplifies the notion that the imagination is not the same in everyone nor is it used in the same manner. Furthermore, by the beginning of the sentence being parallel to that of the next the link between the two sentences is established as well as the explication. Additionally, Stevens makes reference to a dichotomy between day and night and the sun and moon in sections five, seven and eight, which also serves the same purpose of making clear the subjective nature of the imagination.

Another way Stevens tries to show the reader that the imagination is a self evolving thing is by his use of anastrophe. This technique is applied in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” when Stevens says, “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.'”(133). The inversion of the rhyming and words illustrates that each person has a different perspective that shapes their imagination. Based upon this shaping of a person's imagination their perception and interpretation varies. By recording both the they and man's viewpoint, Stevens embodies the idea that the imagination is not absolute. Additionally, Stevens presents both opinions in regards to change. Namely, the opinion of the they which states that people cause change, as opposed to the opinion of the man which says that the blue guitar (ie nature) causes change. In not limiting himself to one perspective, he conveys the ideal nature of the imagination.

To summarize, Wallace Stevens is deeply concerned with the imagination and its implications. Therefore, he devotes his poetry to clarifying the imagination and its ways. Primarily, he utilizes the methods of dichotomy and anastrophe to achieve this goal. Ultimately, Stevens wants the reader to understand that the imagination is a highly influenced part of our lives. Due to the imagination's powerfulness and impact everyone can have a different perspective. Another goal Stevens wants to attain is explaining the relationship between the imagination and reality. He desires for the reader to see that the two are related and work closely together in an overlapping manner. The movement from the imagination to reality is aided by gaining a knowledge in one realm and seeking clarification in another or an application to the other.