in the last stanza, see daytime facts as one’s own
nighttime creations.
Such a transformation would achieve what
‘‘The Blue Guitar’’ seeks: a ‘‘dream no longer a
dream, a thing, / Of things as they are’’ (143). It
turns Stevens’s desire for an accord between poetry
and truth into his recognition of an interrelation
between night and day. Indeed, Stevens’s work
rewrites incessantly and explicitly the traditional
equation of poetry or imagination with other night-
work: when Crispin denies himself imagination, to
take one of many instances, he expunges ‘‘dreams’’
(32). Criticism has neglected this conflation, or per-
haps considered it too obvious to mention, but it is
basic to Stevens’s quotidian poetics: by rendering
dreams part of an ordinary mode, Stevens natural-
izes and democratizes creative power. In so doing,
he rewrites the romanticism of an early model,
Keats, who compares sleep and poetry almost as
frequently as Stevens does and whose moon-
governed ‘‘Endymion’’ was a particular favorite of
Stevens. Like that work, Stevens’s early poems and
journal entries worry over the division between the
night’s illusion and the day’s reality. By the time of
‘‘TheManwiththeBlueGuitar,’’however,Stevens
arrives at a conception of the imagination much like
the one Keats evolved: Keats describes how Adam
found his dream to be true at the moment of waking
(Keats,Letters36), and Stevens describes dream
becoming fact just ‘‘as daylight comes’’ (Collected
143). In his everyday poetics, however, the trans-
formation is not Keats’s divine revelation but the
simple naturalism of night turning to morning.
Therefore, one need not be an Adamic believer or
even an Adamic artist to know imagination made
real; one need only be an ordinary human being,
living in and by a pattern of sleep and rising. This is
the broad polity claimed in the final ‘‘we’’ (151) of
‘‘TheManwiththeBlueGuitar’’;inordinarytime,
Stevens tells his fellows, all human beings may be
accomplished dreamers.
This accomplishment supplants both religious
and political fulfillment. We can see Stevens’s dis-
placement of the first through his response to
another modern version of Keats’s dream theory:
Freud’s work also begins with an illusory power
basic to the human psyche. His description of the
wishful dreaming in ordinary sleep may be likened
to Stevens’s description of the desirous dreaming
that is ordinary poetry, and in both Freud’s psy-
choanalysis and Steven’s poetics this common
process extends artistic agency to all human beings.
Stevens himself repels any direct association: in a
1934 survey, for example, he dismissed psychoana-
lytic influence, adding that he had ‘‘not read Freud
except theInterpretation’’ (Collected771). To make
exception for theInterpretation of Dreamsis cer-
tainly to qualify the dismissal, and in a lecture less
than two years later, at about the time he was
writing ‘‘The Man with the Blue Guitar,’’ Stevens
wrote that Freud’s work had ‘‘given the irrational a
legitimacy that it never had before (783).’’ But
Stevens wished to defend that legitimacy against
Freud’s own distrust of dreaming. He does so most
explicitly through confrontations with The Future
of an Illusion, where Freudcritiques the mass-scale
wish fulfillment of religious faith; Stevens argues
that an abandonment of religion, and a resulting
‘‘education’’ or ‘‘surrender’’ to ‘‘reality’’ (651), need
not be a surrender of illusion altogether. Human
dreams can be something other than the delusive
yearning for heaven that Freud describes, Stevens
argues in ‘‘Imagination as Value’’; illusions might
be a verified desire for what this world grants.
In a ‘‘science of illusions’’ (728), Stevens explains,
‘‘deliberate fictions’’ could accord with that ‘‘true
work of art’’ that is one’s ‘‘time and... place.’’
This is the ordinary dreamwork that Stevens
woulddescribein‘‘AnOrdinaryEvening,’’written
just after this lecture. In this poem the ‘‘search for
God’’ yields to a ‘‘search / For reality’’ that is also
the ‘‘daily’’ (410) search of the recurrent quotidian.
Stevens first suggests this substitution in ‘‘The Man
with the Blue Guitar’’ 12 years earlier, with the
poem’s concluding address to a generation. This
audience seeks, in its request to the poet, something
‘‘to take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns’’
(137), and Stevens in his final canto responds: Sun-
day’s eternal sacrament is replaced with Monday’s
daily bread, the mark of a Christian covenant with
the ‘‘actual stone’’ (151) of the earth, and the single
conclusion of eternity—‘‘Time in its final block’’
(150)—with the continuing wrangle of a routine
‘‘time to come’’ (151). Such substitutions, Stevens
assures his fellow citizens, grant a continuing power
to dream—a power that their distrust of religious
illusion has stifled: in canto 5 they are without
any illusions at all, on a ‘‘flat and bare’’ (136) earth
where ‘‘night is sleep’’ and their sun is shadowless. In
this they prefigure those ‘‘Plain men in plain towns’’
from ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’’ men
who have ‘‘fought / Against illusion’’—have read
Freud’sFuture of an Illusion, perhaps—and fall
asleep at night merely ‘‘snuffed out’’ (399). If those
citizens find ‘‘appeasement’’ for such a state in the
‘‘savage and subtle and simple harmony’’ of their
indigenous situation, a ‘‘matching and mating ofOf Modern Poetry