Reality in Wallace Stevens’ The Man with the Blue Guitar
For Wallace Stevens, reality is an abstraction with many perspective possibilities. As a poet, Stevens struggles to create original perspectives of reality. Wallace Stevens creates a new, modern reality in his poetry. Actually, Stevens decreates reality in his poetry. In The Necessary Angel, Stevens paraphrases Simone Weil’s coinage of decreation as the change from created to uncreated or from created to nothingness. Stevens then defines modern reality as, “a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers”(750). Stevens relates, through poetry, a destruction of traditional reality leading to a realization that the meaning of a poem is not truth, always recognizing that the poem is the poets perception of reality. This perception of reality is based on experience, historical context, and poetic skill, among others. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” is a long poem that allows Stevens to change perspectives and create abstract realities. Parataxis in such a long poem allows for the decreation of reality and the relation of imagination.
In his book, The long poems of Wallace Stevens: An interpretive study, Rajeev S. Patke describes varied progression within “The Man with the Blue Guitar” as “an indefinite improvisatory series. In such a series the unitary sections lose their independent status as poems, and their masks and metaphors become stages in the continual play of metamorphosis which is the true life of Stevens’s poetry”(241). Imbedded in Patke’s description of “the true life of Stevens’s poetry”, is the parataxis that a sectioned poem provides. Each movement from section t...
... middle of paper ...
...ique and presentation of Stevens’s concepts may be confusing and/or contradicting, but the overall presentation allows for the full realization of different perceptions and their comparison and contrast all lead back to Stevens’s purpose for poetry. This purpose being to relate experience while recognizing that each experience/perception/reality/dream is unique and insightful. In a long poem with many sections, an overall theme or fiction may not be attainable or seen as contradictory. The value of this poem lies in the realization and acknowledgment of different perspectives, and the acceptance an evolving world.
Work Cited
Patke, Rajeev. The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens: An interpretive study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985.
Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. 1997.
Four years after the publication of the first edition of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Wallace Stevens described a modern aesthetic form which necessarily acted against its own status as a (fixed) form1. "What will [temporarily] suffice" in "Modern Poetry" would replace, as the mind's object, what is--or, perhaps more faithfully to the modernist vision, what used to be. The poem of the motion of the mind in time would replace the poem of permanent meaning.
Thomas." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. 101-10. Print.
Clinic, Mayo. Attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in Children. 1998-2013. Document. 29 November 2013.
Strand, Mark and Evan Boland. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New
According to Maria Basile, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is classified as a disruptive behavior disorder characterized by ongoing difficulty with attention span, hyperactivity, and/or impulsivity. She points out that many children have challenged themselves to keep the disorder under control. She also shows that the children can be over-active or impulsive. Their development is not equal to an average child. Numerous of researches have been constructed in order to determine the percentage of children that posse ADHD. Basile shows statistics that reveal the percentage of the children who have ADHD, “The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) estimates that 3% to 5% of children have ADHD. Some experts, though, say ADHD may occur in 8% to 10% of school age children” (Basi...
ADHD is broken into three subtypes. The first is those who are impulsive and hyperactive. The second type is made up from those who are inattentive only. The third group is those who display all of these symptoms combined. In the United States, 3-5% of children show signs of this disorder. It has also been shown that the disorder is more dominant in boys. Many children with ADHD do not outgrow this disorder and carry it on into their adult lives. Various studies have shown that two-thirds of children with ADHD still have the disorder in their 20’s making it is a problem which affects children and adults alike.
Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), once called hyperkinesis or minimal brain dysfunction, is one of the most common mental disorders among children. (Elia, Ambrosini, Rapoport, 1999) It affects 3 to 5 percent of all children, with approximately 60% to 80% of these children experiencing persistence of symptoms into adolescence and adulthood, causing a lifetime of frustrated dreams and emotional pain. There are two types of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: an inattentive type and a combined type. The symptoms of ADHD can be classified into three categories: inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. This behaviour stops ADHD sufferers from focussing deliberately on organising and completing a specific task that they may not enjoy, learning new skills or information is proved to be impossible. An example of such behaviour is recognised by the report written by the National Institute of Mental Health where one of the subjects under study was unable to pass schooling examinations due to her inattentive behaviour. Such behaviour can damage the person's relationships with others in addition to disrupting their daily life, consuming energy, and diminishing self-esteem. (National Institute of Mental Health 1999) There are also secondary symptoms which are associated with ADHD, such as learning disorders, anxiety, depression and other mood disorders, tic disorders, and conduct disorders. (Spencer, Biederman, and Wilens 1999 in Monastra V, Monastra D, George, 2002)
Nakamura, K. Richard. “Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorders: Are Children Being Overmedicated?” National Institute of Mental Health. 2002. Web. 02 May 2014.
One particularly useful cross-disciplinary element employed in concrete poetry is the use of space. The poetry of Emmett Williams, Seiichi Nikuni, and Ilse and Pierre Garnier in particular, make use of spatial relationships in their poetry. The use of space can be employed in place of traditional grammar and syntax to convey meaning in concrete poetry, particularly when the spatial position of one element is taken into consideration with other elements of the poem. Another element that may arise from these spatial relationships is a temporal aspect that all poetry employs, but which becomes uniquely meaningful in the context of the concrete poetry of the twentieth century. Without these relationships concrete poems may appear as crude distortions of words on a page, with no significant sense or meaning to communicate. Therefore, the temporal/spatial relationships between poetic elements become necessary tools which the reader needs in order to fully understand the linguistically driven meaning behind many concrete poems.
Pelvic inflammatory disease is an infectious disease that invades the female reproductive organs such as the uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries. Pelvic inflammatory disease also known as PID, is caused by infectious bacteria such as Chlamydia trachomatis, Neisseria gonorrhea and other bacteria. Bacteria that travel from the vagina to the cervix will cause inflammation, pain, damage and infertility. Women, who are susceptible to PID, will develop the disease if they have unprotected sex with a person who is infected with Chlamydia or gonorrhea. However, not all women will develop PID and it is not known why. In rare circumstances, PID will occur due to the following events such as abortions, miscarriage, insertion of IUD, Pap smear procedure and cervical treatment for having an abnormal pap smear (familydoctor.org editorial staff, 2008).
Jarrell, Randall. ?Fifty Years of American Poetry.? The Third Book of Criticism. NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.
In the celebrated poem by American author Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar,” we are driven to examine and understand the many symbolic connotations of “the jar” in its particular placement upon a hill; those of which may potentially coincide with the many interpretations of this world. While “the jar” represents many ideas corresponding to our paradigms of how we perceive our world, the most profound idea to me is the notion of emptiness which parallels the reality of emptiness in the prose “Clay” by James Joyce. The jar is an empty object, unable to give, only enabled to be acknowledged its presence. This is similar to the many depths in which the character Maria in “Clay” feels endlessly vacant to the core of her soul. They are comparable to each other in the lonely concept of emptiness.
Poetry, Drama, and the Essay. Ed. Joseph Terry. New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc, 2001. 123-154.
Belasco, Susan, and Linck Johnson, eds. The Bedford Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1, 2nd Ed., Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2014. 1190-1203. Print.
Before addressing any of Stevens’ poems, it must be made clear that this argument is narrowly focusing itself on the visual images within several of Stevens’ poems. To fully examine the sidelines and tangents of a single poem would be impossible, as the poems themselves grow with discovered philosophies, and appeal to innumerable viewpoints and interpretations. Furthermore, because the word image can have a multiplicity of meanings and derivatives, depending on the school of thought the reader has absorbed, I will constrain the definition of image, within this paper, to the stoic “To describe; especially to describe as to call up a mental picture of” (Morris, 657).