Stevens and Surrealism: The Genesis of "The Man with the Blue Guitar"

Abstract

HE 1930S mark the major transition in Wallace Stevens' poetic career, from the exuberant variety of Harmonium (1923) to the theoretical coherence and stylistic virtuosity of his later years. social upheaval of this decade forced Stevens to reevaluate his aesthetic stance, to evolve a poetic voice that would at once be socially responsible and allow full play to his highly cultivated talent. Stevens' most extended effort to establish his relation to contemporary ideas, as he put it (L, p. 340),2 was the long series of poems entitled Owl's Clover, which he labored over from the spring of 1935 through the spring of 1936. That series is generally considered a poetic failure, a judgment Stevens himself confirmed by excluding it from his Collected Poems.3 But later that same year, in December, he began writing what would become his most successful long poem to date, The Man with the Blue Guitar. How can we account for this sudden and remarkable advance, in 1936, from Owl's Clover to The Man with the Blue Guitar? We can answer this question, I think, if we set The Man with the Blue Guitar in its proper context: the art world of 1936. key element in that context was the literary and artistic movement known as Surrealism.