Reality in Wallace Stevens’ The Man with the Blue Guitar Essay

The article offers a unique view into Hughes’s poetry, revealing another side of Hughes’s expertise as a poet. Although she does spend a great deal of time on the discussion of the importance of Hughes’s diction to the rhythms he wanted to infuse into the aforementioned five pieces, Dickinson does more than the traditional literary analysis in order to explain Hughes’s talents as a writer. With special attention given to the five of his lesser-known works, she gives the reader an opportunity to hear the music within the lines of many pieces.

To help Year Twelve students that are studying poetry appreciate it's value, this pamphlet's aim is to discuss a classic poem and a

Through my studies of this poem, I was unable to find any documentation of the poet, Jim Stevens; therefore I was unable to assess his life and his reasoning behind writing this poem. Because of this I have had to make my own assumption that Jim Stevens might be writing this poem about himself. His lack of publication leaves a

He thought poetry was an art of association, it inspires readers' imagination with symbolism rather than direct imitation of life, and hold the reader's feelings and arouse them to act with passion. His style throughout the 19th century formed the mainstream of American poetry”(1).

to lend meaning to the poem beyond its existence as a work of historic fiction

(1) “While music is changed to language, with the attendant change in meaning and while the obsession is still with bringing light and thus reason, the narrator is opening up the meaning with reference to “we” and to the emotional conditions of suffering and delight.” 1

Poetry has a role in society, not only to serve as part of the aesthetics or of the arts. It also gives us a view of what the society is in the context of when it was written and what the author is trying to express through words. The words as a tool in poetry may seem ordinary when used in ordinary circumstance. Yet, these words can hold more emotion and thought, however brief it was presented.

In “The Weary Blues” Hughes uses imagery to communicate to the reader what the narrator is experiencing while listening to blues. The reader can feel the slow and steady beat of the music: “He did a lazy sway…/ He did a lazy sway…” (4-5). The flow of the two lines mimics the beat of the music. The reader can hear the pain in the voice of the musician: “In a deep voice with a

the deep answer.”(6) and these sentences that he wrote speaks as to make sure that poetry is

Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue is the single biggest selling jazz album ever made, selling over 5 million copies, and was my favorite to learn about. It is known to be one of albums that convert people to liking jazz styled music, even though it was created over fifty years ago. The most significant part of the album to me was that it made such an impact on the jazz community and it was only made in seven hours and all but only one of the tracks were first takes. What has stuck with me in the documentary was the saying, “The first thought is the best thought.” I really appreciated this because the artist stuck with their initial first gut feeling. The music was really innovative and most specifically, the opening of “So What”, was completely improvised and then the riff takes off, allowing to be one of the most iconic songs in jazz (in my opinion). The magic of music was truly created in this album creation and led a different direction of jazz creation.

poem is not merely a static, decorative creation, but that it is an act of communication between the poet and

Written by the poet Wallace Stevens, “The Plain Sense of Things” creates an atmosphere of imagination, reality and symbolism of natural progression. Stated by POETRY FOUNDATION, Wallace Stevens is one of America’s most respected poets (Wallace Stevens, 2017). Wallace Stevens work is known for its imagination and relates to both English Romantics and French symbolists and is considered one of the major American poets of the century (Stevens, Wallace 2014). In “The Plain Sense of Things”, it is evident that imagination is a huge aspect within the poem.

“The relationship between the energies of the inquiring mind that an intelligent reader brings to the poem and the poem’s refusal to yield a single comprehensive interpretation enacts vividly the everlasting intercourse between the human mind, with its instinct to organise and harmonise, and the baffling powers of the universe about it.”

Stevens makes this fact apparent from the beginning of the poem, when he notes not only “human revery” but also “the sexual myth” and the “poem of death” (1). Therefore, these defined formulations are only categories of a greater whole, which remains unmentioned in the poem. In deliberating on Stevens’s poems, we can come to understand this encompassing whole as the imagination, which impels an individual to make “eccentric propositions” about his or her life and fate (4-5, 10).

The poem, if it be a true poem is a simulacrum of reality in this sense; at least, it is an imitation by being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience (Brooks, 1947). In this case, the poem was created based on the experiences in which there is a unity of the poem itself,