Lessons from “The Blue Guitar”
When I was in college, I had a class on poetry. One of my classmates was a respected artist on campus. She had paintings and drawings on display in the University of Illinois Art Gallery: it was not often that a student enjoyed an entire display to herself. For some reason I cannot fully explain to this day, I didn’t like her. I’m confident this says more about me and my shortcomings than it says about her.
As a student, she oozed that confidence that comes from the adulation of talent. She was extremely well-read, and to be honest, a person could learn a lot just listening to her analysis. But one day we were reading the Wallace Stevens poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar;” this lead to our only interaction for the semester -- an argument.
Wallace Stevens was a poet influenced by the Imagist movement. The Imagists tried to write their poems starkly, in a manner that evoked an image without attempting to explain it. Their philosophy was that words could not improve the communication of the image. In a way, they saw themselves like photo journalists. The interesting thing about being a photojournalist with words is that no two readers of an imagist poem will ever have exactly the same mental picture. The power of imagery is that we bring to it our own memories and experiences.
In the course of my classmate’s analysis (which was always first, and always the longest), there was something that just didn’t make sense. In describing what she saw upon reading the poem, it became clear that she imagined a man playing a red guitar. I mean, the name of the poem was “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” but when she read it, she somehow imagined a man playing a red guitar.
I was incredulous. I finally interrupted and explained that, despite her obvious genius and artistic sensibilities (don’t worry, I only thought these things), she should have in her mind a blue guitar. Her blue guitar might be a different shade of blue than the blue guitar in my mind, and our guitars were probably different sizes and shapes. Her man may have been playing it left-handed, and mine right handed, but neither she nor the Imagists were so omnipotent that they could randomly change the meaning of the word “blue” to mean “red,” or suddenly change the entire structure of English grammar so that adjectives no longer modified nouns!
I understand that much of the joy in life is in its ambiguities, but we should not exploit that uncertainty to define the world solely in our terms, or for situational convenience.