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The first part of ‘The Man With the Blue Guitar’ by Wallace Stevens:

       The man bent over his guitar,
       A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

       They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
       You do not play things as they are.’

       The man replied, ‘Things as they are
       Are changed upon the blue guitar.’

       And they said then, ‘But play, you must,
       A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

       A tune upon the blue guitar
       Of things exactly as they are.’

What then is the poet, the shearsman, to do? Is he/she to use just ordinary language, the blue guitar, or the language of poetry, changed upon the blue guitar? Is it possible to meet the demands – a tune beyond us, yet ourselves? How is wanting things exactly as they are compatible with a tune on the blue guitar? Wallace Stevens gives us no answers. Instead, here is a satisfying poem. How so?
       Post-romantic literature is increasingly concerned with how the poet creates ideas in the imagination, the importance of fantasy and, as Wallace Stevens indicates, the implicit tension between dream and reality. In communicating fresh views of ‘reality’ poetry provides surprise through striking imagery and inventive sound patterns; the listener/reader has to pay close attention. There is increasing sensitivity to the role of ‘otherness’, the relationship between the subject and object, the idea of being in Matthew Arnold’s words ‘in harmony with nature’. Of course that kind of simplicity does not represent the Romantics’ position but Wordsworth certainly expresses a sense of awe at what is beyond or other than the self
in his poetry. In ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ he
writes of this sense of wonder:

      ……a sense sublime
      Of something far more deeply interfused
      Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
      And the round ocean, and the living air,
      And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
      A motion and a spirit that impels
      All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
     And rolls through all things. (lines 96–103)

In this poem Wordsworth writes about how nature affects him and the way it leads him to ‘see into the life of things’ (line 49), to have a sense of truth and value in the world. But then he writes that ‘if this be but a vain belief ’ suggesting that he is sufficiently sceptical to realise that he could be misled by his own imagination. By the end of the poem he realises that it is nature and his mind which combine to give him the sense of harmony or order in nature. He reflects on the imaginative process which creates the ideas; similar reflections are found in several of his other poems in which he writes of landscape or people and gives his imaginative interpretation of his observations. Then he questions whether his perception may be trusted. This is a long way away from Arnold’s remarks on harmony. It is clear that the Romantic vision is not naïve; these poets see ‘reality’ as complex and they emphasised the role of imagination and the importance of fantasy. They continue to be very influential on modern thinking about the creative imagination; this is seen for example in Yeats
and Wallace Stevens and other poets, many living now, some of whom are mentioned later.
       Wordsworth’s self-doubt should be set against his ability to create a sense of mystical insight. His awareness of the frequent ambiguity of sense experience and the strangeness of perception led to the writing of his finest poetry. The following extract represents his central ideas and feelings:

     With these impressions would he still compare
     All his ideal stores, his shapes and forms,
     And being still unsatisfied with aught
     Of dimmer character, he thence attained
     An active power to fasten images
     Upon his brain, and on their pictured lines
      Intensely brooded, even till they acquired
      The liveliness of dreams. Nor did he fail
     While yet a child, with a child’s eagerness
      Incessantly to turn his ear and eye
      On all things which the rolling season brought
      To feed such appetite. ……

This is from ‘The Pedlar’ (1798) which he later incorporated in ‘The
Excursion’. The forms and shapes of things stay in the pedlar’s mind
from his youth and haunt his seeing in future. They are impressed on
him by deep feelings from which they could not be separated later in
his life. In many other poems he also reflects on the way that the
natural world can be understood and written about only if images are
imprinted in the poet’s mind and discusses the imagination as a link
between the natural and the supernatural. Coleridge writes of the
paradox of continuing to write with imaginative fluency about the
threatened loss of the Imagination. In ‘Dejection: An Ode’ he turns
from ‘reality’s dark dream’ and listens to the wind, its beauty paralleled by the ‘spirit of Imagination’. As he unifies the inner and outer worlds of his imaginative creation he discovers psychological and spiritual antidotes to depression. He conceives harmony and order in nature but writes frequently of the failure of his imagination to perceive it, and clearly describes his sense of alienation between human beings and the world in which they live.
        The German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke died in 1926. He travelled a lot and had a lifelong sense of homelessness. He met Tolstoy and worked as secretary to the sculptor Rodin who he came to know through one of Rodin’s students who became Rilke’s wife. Rilke was deeply impressed by Rodin and the way he worked hard for long hours making things. This led to the development of his poetry from being about solitary emotional experiences to poems about looking at animals, people, sculptures and paintings. Although his focus changes from the poet’s self and onto things seen, Rilke continues to write inward looking poetry. Through the inspiration of Rodin and painters like Paula Modersohn-Becker and Cezanne, his work has a feeling of being actively made. He is a complex individual who is tormented by a sense of human inadequacy and lack of wholeness which leads him to seek transformation through his texts. He writes of a world in which fate and even God are famous for answering humanity with silence and says that if Nature is to be a redemptive symbol for the fate of humanity, if it is to give a new meaning to existence, it needs to be seen as something distant and foreign, an Other. Rilke’s poems are specially striking because of his vision of nature. He was greatly impressed by the way artists like Cezanne were absorbed in looking at the mystery of the world around them and how suddenly they see things as they had not seen them before. The extracts which follow are from the ninth Duino Elegy:

    But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
    apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange
    way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. (lines 11–13)

    For when the traveller returns from the mountain-slopes into the
    valley, he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but
    instead some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow
    and blue gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
    bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window – (lines 29–33)

He writes of the magnificence and beauty of the world and the joy of being in it, of how things like stones or animals are not mere objects but are transformed by artists and understood and loved by human beings. Although Harold Bloom’s view, that what compels poets to write is their need or desire to challenge their predecessors and peers, is authoritative, there are some artists whose work is so outstanding that they defy simple categorisation. Kathleen Raine died in 2003 and shared Blake’s vision of the power of the imagination. Much of her poetry is inspired by landscape, Scotland particularly, and has what she described as a ‘sense of the sacred’, an intense vision of nature. The following poem ‘In the Beck’ is from her earliest significant collection, Stone and Flower (1943):

    There is a fish that quivers in the pool,
    itself a shadow, but its shadow, clear.
    Catch it again and again, it is still there.

    Against the flowing stream, its life keeps pace
    With death in the impulse and the flash of grace
    hiding in its stillness, moves, to be motionless.

The clarity of her perception in this poem is characteristic and much of her work consists of meditations on glimpses of the transcendent seen through nature. Her insights are expressed through vivid images which avoid abstraction. She received recognition abroad earlier than in her home country where she is known for scholarly studies of Plato, Plotinus and Thomas Taylor. She received the Queen’s gold medal in 1992.
    John Burnside is a poet and novelist who was born in 1955 and may be the only younger writer on nature who has developed as a mystical poet, and has been compared with Geoffrey Hill. I find both of these poets difficult to understand and they can be disturbing on the emotional level. The excerpt which follows is from Burnside’s poem ‘Sense Data’ in The Asylum Dance (2000), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award:

    I thought there was a chromatography
    for happiness, or unrequited love,

    and somewhere behind it all, in private realms
    of gulls’ eggs and stones and things I couldn’t name,

    another world of charge and borderline,
    an earth – tide in the spine, the nightlong
    guesswork of old voices in the mind.

This is a poem of inner space and Otherness. He mentions borderlines, walls and boundaries quite often and seems to constantly explore the line (or space?) between reality and imagination. This example is in ‘The Unprovable Fact; A Tayside Inventory’ (The Asylum Dance):

    From a distance
                they only missed
    what they never saw:
    the pull of borderlines
                slow
    tide shifts in the angle of a wall
    the slip of water
                  underneath a quay
    shadows that came through snow
                      on a journey home.

Burnside’s world is one of entrances and boundaries, home and the
supernatural, smell and touch, animals and angels. He uses images and fragments of narrative in his metaphysical explorations and he appears to enable us to revise our view of the universe and make it more miraculous and more disturbing. Underneath the surface of our world there is always mystery waiting to be recognised and his poems lead to a kind of progressive awakening.
    R. S. Thomas, one of the major lyric poets of our time who writes of the self, love, science, technology and the natural world, died in 2000. He is one of Wales’ greatest poets who is saddened by rural deprivation and in his later poems particularly, warns against dehumanisation and materialism. He produced very powerful work in his later years, continuing to describe his walking, looking at the sea, the rugged beauty of his homeland and his solitary bird-watching expeditions, looking for God, waiting in silence, but always searching and questioning. He writes:

    This Christmas before
    an altar of gold
    the holly will remind
    us how love bleeds,

    the mistletoe remind
    how pale and puny
    the knuckles of the few
    fingers clenched upon faith.

This poem, ‘Festival’ is from Residues published posthumously in 2002. It is stark and undeveloped, confronting the reader with its pain, paradox and his vulnerability but remaining enigmatic. By contrast here is ‘Launching a Prayer’ from the same collection:

    ……Circularity
    is endless, yet
    one prayer, slipping
    the reason, speeds out

    into the cornerless
    universe so close to God
    as to open a crater
    in his composure.

Thomas seldom provides answers or revelations but provokes further questions, and in this very unsettling poem, by firing off prayers into the surrounding dark, he confirms the need to continue the search.
    Poets and artists impose imaginative interpretations on nature but,
like Coleridge and Wordsworth, see ‘reality’ as complex and distrust their perceptions. Imagination creates its own world which may be a ‘sacred place’ although virtue cannot be claimed for literature in itself; collusion between creation, imagination and the diabolical are often found in texts. Rilke shows that there are many ways of picturing awareness and values are inherent in perception. Our stream of consciousness carries value judgements and poetry is indispensable in helping us see fresh, varied, different and contradictory truths. Seeking ‘truth’ is a moral act and Kathleen Jamie speaks of finding the idea of the ‘sacred’ as scary. Kathleen
Raine and John Burnside among others believe that images are of profound importance for morality. Their poems rest on sensitivity, respect for creation, compassion and music; they have transforming power and transcend themselves. In his spare lyrics R. S. Thomas questions himself and paradoxically searches for faith he mistrusts, but his doubt seems to have more belief in it than many peoples’ dogma. He writes of searching and of rare glimpses of values like ‘truth’ in the belief that they are among the eternal attributes of humanity. Wallace Stevens confronts the paradoxical nature of reading and writing; a poem’s subject is poetry and reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor. In a time of spiritual decay poetry can provide a ‘sacred place’ in the inner world where rare
glimpses of transcendence are found.