Wallace Stevens The Man with the Blue Guitar PDF

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Wallace Stevens’ “The Man with the Blue Guitar” Wallace Stevens’ was an American poet during the early to middle twentieth century. Unlike most poets of his time, Stevens had a full-time career as a lawyer and spent his evenings and vacations writing poetry. Although he was greatly criticized for this, Stevens’ saw no issues with pursuing real-world endeavors as well as exploring his imagination through poetry. Stevens’ ultimate goal when writing poetry was for a reader to connect the abstract world with their natural language. In Wallace Stevens’ The Man with the Blue Guitar, the man uses the guitar to reflect upon the real world, or “things as they are”, but also twists one’s reality into something unrecognizable at times through the imagination, or a changed reality of sorts. The poem portrays the abstract thoughts of people while remaining grounded in real time. Wallace typically didn’t think poetry really reflected true human experience, but in The Man with the Blue Guitar, he attempts to capture both man’s reality and imagination simultaneously. The symbolism in Stevens’ word choices demonstrate denotative and connotative meanings. There are multiple words and phrases that Steven’s used in this poem that could portray both denotative and connotative meanings. For instance, in poem II, “The overcast blue of the air” literally shows the blue sky, however it implies the sadness that is blanketed over these people. In poem III, “deformed” literally means misshapen but could be taken as not fitting in with society. Again, in poem III, “Am I a man that is dead?” could denotatively mean passed away, or could connotatively mean dead in spirit, drained, so-to-speak. In poem IX, “I am a native in this world” literally means a man among people but can imply that he has a mind of his own and his own thoughts. In poem X, “So it is to sit and balance things” denotatively means the same on each side, but connotatively could represent one sorting things out in his mind and attempting to make sense of things.

It is apparent in Stevens’ writing that as a whole, the words and phrases that he uses encompass much symbolic and metaphorical language. Wallace Stevens exuded much freedom in his expression of human realities as well as a person’s ability to drift into their own imagination. He was very conscious of his audience in that his word usage could appeal to a range of simple to contemporary peoples. As one can see in the use of denotative and connotative words in his poetry, Stevens was known as complex and even provocative in his writings. Much of his poetic skills stem from his various working experiences from universities to journalism. Although his love for writing poetry never ceased, he did venture to study law under his father’s advice and even incorporated parts of that world into his writings as well. Ultimately through The Man with the Blue Guitar, Stevens shaped and defined perceived reality and the power of imagination through this well-articulated poem....