Poetry and Music: Wallace Stevens’s Sound-scape in The Man with the Blue Guitar

Abstract

Although Wallace Stevens presents very intriguing sound events in many of his poems, scholars have focused more on his ocular-centric metaphorics than his sound-scape and its symbolism. Thus, this paper makes an attempt to examine the sound-marks in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” within the Eastern metaphysical frame of ‘Mu-wuy-Ja-Yeon’ (無爲自然). In particular, drawing on the influence of Okakura Kakuzo’s The Book of Tea on Stevens’s cosmopolitan sensibility, it takes a close look at Taoist and Zen-Buddhist notions of becoming, relativity, artless art and makes a parallel between a Taoist artist Peiwoh and the musician-poet in The Man with the Blue Guitar. Then it tries to explicate how Stevens adapts the sound-marks of Eastern metaphysics and aesthetics in his modernist experimentation to summon up something that is not quite expressible in the ocular-centric metaphorics. Ultimately, this paper aims to suggest an alternative approach to appreciate the Eastern sound-marks as part of the modern song of America Stevens played with his blue guitar.