Theory as Praxis: The Man With the Blue Guitar

Abstract

Although many years later Stevens claimed that he confined his focus in The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937) to ‘the area of poetry’ (L, no. 873), this brilliantly concise poem – or perhaps we should say sequence of 33 poems – explores the necessary preconditions to creativity: self-knowledge and knowledge of man. While Vendler misses the vastness that she admires in the other longer Stevens poems, should we not applaud its efficiency, intensity, control, and unity?1 If any poem defines the nature of Stevens’s creative and artistic life, it is this one. Stevens used his poems to create metaphors of himself, tropes of his essential being as a poet separate and apart from his diurnal concerns. To read Stevens is to participate in the adventure of his creating his persona. In this poem he tests various notions of the poet – as comedian, vates, legislator, lyricist. Within the poem, both the speaker’s selfconcept and the external space undergo constant change and modification. Indeed, we should think of The Man With the Blue Guitar not only as a Socratic dialogue in which various theories of poetry are proposed, but as an exhibition of ventriloquy where the speaker tries on every conceivable voice of the poet. Among other things, Stevens is auditioning for the crucial roles of the major modernist poet – the poetic counterpart of Picasso – and the major American poet in the tradition of Emerson and Whitman.