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.