50
PARTISAN REVIEW
of the surface, we get nothing but a sense of play and jocular attitudin-
izing:
To strike his living hi and ho,
To tick it, tock it, turn it true,
If we dig into just such usages and then come back to the poem as a
whole, we understand the justice of such verbalism, its necessity, and we
are confronted with a mind of the utmost seriousness, aware and in-
volved in the most important things in our lives.
The imagination and actuality, the blue guitar which is poetry and
things as they are, constitute the antithesis to which Stevens devotes
a varied discourse in the present book. In the title poem or suite of
poems, there are thirty-three short lyrics in whkh the various relation-
ships between art and the actual world are named, examined, turned
upside down, and transformed into the terms of Stevens' personal vision.
In the opening lyric, we are given the suggestion of some lack in the
nature of poetry. The poet is addressed by his audience:
They said, «You have a blue guitar,
Tou do not play things as they are"
The poet replies that the imagination must of necessity alter and distort
actuality, and the audience then extends its demand:
«But play you must
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar.
Of things exactly as they are."
The difficulty is that poetry is somehow insufficient. The incidence of
that insufficiency, its present point, is made evident further on in the
poem:
The earth is not earth, but a stone,
Not the mother that held men as they fell,
But stvne, but like a stone, no, not
The mother but an oppressor
It is because of an enforced awareness that his time is one of immense
conflict and derangement that the poet has been compelled to consider
the nature of poetry in its travail among things as they are. The basic
preoccupation, the apprehension which has produced two volumes in two
years, was revealed most explicitly in the previous book,
Ideas of Order:
There is order in neither sea nor sun,
There are these sudden mobs of men,
Except to be happy, without knowing how ....
These sudden clouds of faces and arms,
An immense suppression, freed,
These voices crying without knowing for what,
