The pheasant sleeps, the employer and the employee combat each other, and there is a man playing a blue guitar. This is the panoply of what there is, with nothing added to it, with no enchantment or secret vital essence, no special spiritual force behind it. What else do we have but this? "It must be this rhapsody or none,/The rhapsody of things as they are," Wallace Stevens writes in his poem "The Man with the Blue Guitar."1 By this, Stevens perhaps means that the world as it is is akin to the complex interplay of an emotive musical composition. We detect a hint of irony as well, as when we fear that the world is not really as complex or sophisticated as a rhapsody and is instead a dull and meaningless collision. But Stevens does mean that there is nothing more to the world than what there is. It is remarkable that Stevens still finds a place for poetry here.
I will read Stevens' poem as a response to the worldview initiated by a towering intellectual figure, philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant’s major works provided a critique of nothing less than the capacity of reason to understand its own workings and organize life itself. Though he wrote at the height of the Enlightenment in the late 18th century, where advanced thinkers heralded the age that would be governed by reason, the world as it was was still immersed in custom and metaphysical religion at that point. So it is not surprising that it took another century and more for the vision of life he expressed to make its way into poetry in Stevens’ 1937 poem. Stevens, in my view, responded powerfully with a sense of disappointment and confusion to the loss of metaphysical enchantment and certainty that the pre-Kantian worldview held. But at times, he suggests the possibility of accommodation to the new view, and further holds that exploring the poetic sublime and the internal landscape may be a response to that view that still holds the possibility of meaning for life.
We start with the rhapsody. In Kant's first critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, he attempts to answer the question of how science itself is possible. Science posits an external world that is stable, with a sun rising, apples falling, and machines running according to predictable laws. But why should these knowable laws be able to govern the workings of the world? Before Kant, there were two main schools of thought on this matter, the Rationalists and the Empiricists. Rationalists believed that the mind was given access to all the rational principles needed to understand the world a priori, that is, without any actual experience of the world. Empiricists believed that there was no a priori access to knowledge and that all knowledge was derived a posteriori, after experience; further, that there was no rational principle that guaranteed the laws of the world, but they were rather simply mental habits of association. Kant came up with the revolutionary solution that the rational laws we perceive in the world are a consequence of how the mind itself is structured in a rational way that produces rational laws: the a priori categories of the understanding, such as the idea of causality which posits causal connections between events, combined with sensual intuitions pre-formatted according to a priori structures to produce the objective world of objects that can be known rationally.
The process that allows the world to be known at all is thus a sort of rhapsody of the understanding, and there is a richness to letting things be as they are with this rhapsody in view. Kant divested the world of supernatural force and intent, but left us with a rhapsody of understanding the phenomena of the world, the things as they are. For modern man, it must be this rhapsody, that of objects known through scientific knowledge, or else a return to the cave of ignorance. It must be this rhapsody or none, indeed.
Beyond the rhapsody, the central figure of the poem, too, can be seen as a figure for this process of the mind relating to experience. "The day was green," the poem says. A mythical "they" says to the guitarist, "You have a blue guitar,/You do not play things as they are." But the guitarist responds. "Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar." The blue guitar itself shapes experience. The formatting of the guitar provides the material of human experience, regardless of the demand on experience from the “they” to conform to an unknowable thing-in-itself.
As a consequence of this view, much that had made the world before Kant lovable by the human heart was rendered obsolete. For according to reason’s own self-critique, the mind can know only the world of appearances, of objects rendered according to the rational laws of the mind itself. There is no recourse to proofs about any other supernatural forces, as those are seen to always collapse on themselves. For Stevens, this leads to a collapse of certainty and vision.
The earth is not earth but a stone, Not the mother that held men as they fell But stone, but like a stone, no: not The mother, but an oppressor....
Stevens is no longer able to see the earth as the supportive and nourishing mother now that it is known only as a stone as it is seen through scientific reason. The tone of disappointment is palpable throughout these lines.
Similarly, Stevens is disappointed with the possibilities of the Good that can be known in the Kantian view. Since the time of Plato, the Good has been symbolized by the sun. But there is no possibility for Stevens of being "part of the sun" any more, that is, having union with the Good as part of the nature of things. Kant offers the possibility of a rationally projected highest good, but we can no longer say whether it is a good that is part of the nature of things themselves, which leaves Stevens unsatisfied.
The sun no longer shares our works ... And shall I then stand in the sun, as now I stand in the moon, and call it good, The immaculate, the merciful good, Detached from us, from things as they are? Not to be part of the sun? To stand Remote and call it merciful?"
Though Kant posits that there must be the idea of God, a principle of Goodness, for the human reason to guide the strivings of the Will, it must be beyond what is known as certain, for only the world of appearances can be known with certainty, and God and Goodness do not appear in that view. Stevens is a distinctly post-Kantian poet because he knows that he cannot return to the world of certainties, no matter how much the emotion longs for them. Rather than positing a fantasy world where the certainties of God and the summum bonum still exist, he gives expression to the emotion of being cut off from certainties in these beautiful lines.
Despite the longing for the good experienced as a thing in itself, there is at times in the poem an accommodation to the new reality. There is the understanding that life itself goes on.
Slowly the ivy on the stones Becomes the stones. Women become The cities, children become the fields And men in waves become the sea."
Somehow, man persists through the disenchantment. There are cycles, cities, women and men, the return of historical forces of the returning sea and fields as the process of life continues.
But the real possibility for life Stevens sees is in poetry itself. For Kant in his third critique, the beautiful and sublime do not have to do primarily with works of art but with our reactions to nature itself. This might seem to rule out Stevens' views on poetry expressed in the poem. But it seems as though poetry for Stevens is a force of nature. "Perhaps it gives,/in the universal intercourse," Stevens says of poetry. Earlier in the stanza he writes
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?
Stevens posits poetry as a feature of the world, which fills up empty space with paradoxical appearances. It is only here that we have a hope for human life, he seems to suggest. "Poetry/Exceeding music must take the place/Of empty heaven and its hymns".
What is poetry capable of? Poetry can depict those moments of natural beauty, or something even beyond beauty, where all seems to overwhelm us.
The vivid, florid, turgid sky, The drenching thunder rolling by, The morning deluged still by night, The clouds tumultuously bright And the feeling heavy in cold chords Struggling toward impassioned choirs…
Here there is a rich description of the storm, its vividness and heaviness, its sweeping quality. He goes on to say
I know my lazy, leaden twang Is like the reason in a storm; And yet it brings the storm to bear. I twang it out and leave it there.
Although this latter part of the verse verges on the dismissive, trivializing poetry and the storm with the idea of "lazy, leaden twang", he ultimately affirms reason's capacity, and poetry's capacity, to confront the storm, to rise to the level of the storm. In Kant's idea of the sublime discussed in the third critique, we are awed and terrified by sublimity, but still it calls out something in us which is able to rise to the level of what we see. The sublime isn't ultimately about the object but about what happens in the relation between the subject and the object. When Stevens his twang "brings the storm to bear" he describes the capacity of poetry to raise the soul to the sublime by bringing it up to the level of the terrifying storm.
But unlike with Romantic-era poetry, there is no world-soul animating this storm, or the song of the guitar, or the sun or the moon. Stevens' world has no mysterious vitality behind it. Compare this to the lines of Samuel Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” (h/t my Halkyon Academy colleague Jin Choi):
And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze At once the Soul of each, and God of All?"
In this vision the world-soul animates the harps, meaning that it takes each individual as its instrument, stimulating it to the expression of its individual spiritual essence. The blue guitar is not similarly representative of any cosmic process, though. The player is divorced from society, from things as they are, even the goodness of the Sun. It's remarkable that Stevens is able to find poetic beauty anywhere in this conception. Yet Poetry is still there as a saving force.
It is here where Stevens most departs from the vision that Kant held out for human life. Whereas Kant envisioned a world in which all saw their actions guided by the gravity of the reflection that their action should stand up to being made a universal law, Stevens sees a lack of fulfillment in this world that would separate him from living in the goodness of the sun. Instead, Stevens seems to conclude towards the end of the poem that it is the exploration of the inner life that would grant possibility to human life.
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. ... Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand between you and the shapes you take When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
This is the danger in Stevens' vision, that we will be so disappointed by the lack of fulfillment in the Kantian world that we will turn away from the light of reason and step back from what it has shown us into a darkness where we search for some other supposed truth beyond name and light. Kant's view provides us with the strict critical reason’s reflection on the boundaries of what we may know, say, and do. But it is not perhaps a nurturing view that will let us feel at home on earth, and Stevens movingly expresses the heart’s reaction to this. As we can’t stop with Kant, neither can we stop with Stevens; though his disappointment gives us beautiful poetry, it is not ultimately the guide to life we need.
Interesting insights