The Man With the Blue Guitar: A Poem: Background information when reading The Blue Guitar

The Man With the Blue Guitar: A Poem

This article relates to The Blue Guitar

It is not uncommon for a novelist to choose a title for a book from another work of art, such as a line from a song (You Must Remember This, by Joyce Carol Oates) or a painting (Girl With A Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier). The title of John Banville's novel The Blue Guitar comes from a Wallace Stevens poem entitled "The Man with the Blue Guitar." He even uses a quote from the poem as an epigraph to the novel: "Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar." (More about Wallace Stevens in our 'Beyond the Book' for Thirteen Ways of Looking)

Stevens' poem, one of his best known and critically lauded works, is itself inspired by another famous work of art, a painting by Pablo Picasso titled The Old Guitarist. The painting, created in 1903, dates from Picasso's "Blue Period," which refers both to his state of mind at the time and his heavy use of blue, gray, and black in his work. (Picasso's depression was caused by the suicide of a close friend, as well as the poverty he found himself in when he renounced the classical style of painting and moved to Paris to experiment with new modes of expression.)

There are parts of this lengthy poem (it's in 33 sections) where an unspecified narrator is having a dialogue with the old guitarist from the painting about the nature of art, and many of the themes of Banville's novel – art as a translation of reality, for example, or the uniqueness of individual perception – can be found woven throughout Stevens' well-known poem. Other sections involve the guitarist addressing his audience directly: "I cannot bring a world quite 'round/Although I can patch it as I can."

Taken together, the various sections constitute a sort-of dialogue about the role of artists in society and the transformative function of art in the modern world. Poets and poetry are also the subject of some of the sections: "Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry...The earth, for us, is flat and bare." But later "The Man In the Blue Guitar" argues that poetry "must take the place of empty heaven and its hymns."

Critics have found various meanings within Stevens' dioramic dissection of art and poetry, but at its heart, the central unresolved question seems to be whether it is better to see life as it truly is, or enhanced and transformed by art into a new and surprising thing – whether it's better to play "a tune upon the blue guitar/of things exactly as they are," or to use the magic of art to illuminate radiant truths, for "It is the sun that shares our works/The moon shares nothing."

At one point the narrator asks a question that seems more befitting of Stevens the insurance company executive (he worked for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company for decades) than Stevens the poet: "So that's life, then: things as they are?" The Blue Guitar is Banville's novel-long attempt to answer to that question.

Picture of Picasso painting, The Old Guitarist, from The Art Institute of Chicago

Filed under Music and the Arts

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Blue Guitar. It originally ran in November 2015 and has been updated for the August 2016 paperback edition. Go to magazine.