surprised accords’’ thatis manifest in temporal
cycles, the men of ‘‘Blue Guitar’’ find succor in a
similarly indigenous music, and in another ‘‘nuptial
song’’(148)ofharmony.Stevens’s instrument, by
the final canto, takes up the earthly rhythm of day
and night, supplanting the hymns of heaven with
the song of ‘‘things as they are.’’ He thus turns a
future of aviled illusions into a future of everyday
dreaming.
This ‘‘time to come’’ replaces a political
heavenaswellasareligious one, supplanting the
communist program that seems, at times, to be an
even more dangerous rival for Stevens’s poetry
than the Christian church. Indeed, in ‘‘Imagina-
tion as Value,’’ Stevens writes that ‘‘communism
exhibits imagination on its most momentous
scale’’ (730) and ‘‘promises a practicable earthly
paradise’’ (731): communism, it seems, does all
that his verse would. This possibility would have
been even more present to Stevens’s mind at the
timeof‘‘TheManwiththeBlueGuitar,’’whenhe
had just written ‘‘Owl’s Clover,’’ a long meditation
on the role of art in society (152–70). Critics
disagree about the relation between this earlier
workand‘‘TheManwiththeBlueGuitar.’’
Many see the latter as a welcome triumph for the
Stevensian imagination, after the ambivalent
social conscience in ‘‘Owl’s Clover,’’ while others
emphasize the poetic value of ‘‘Owl’s Clover’’ and
the continuing topicality of ‘‘The Man with the
Blue Guitar.’’ It is not just politics that link
the two, however, but dailiness: the transition
from one work to the other signals Stevens’s
deeper allegiance to ordinary time. Indeed, it
was communism’s engagement with time that
spurred Stevens’s engagement with communism;
he regarded this ‘‘great force in politics and in life’’
(Letters486) with an unexpected respect in part
because its emphasis on futurity challenged the
sense of expectation central to his own work.
Communism offers a ‘‘new romanticism’’ (351),
in Stevens’s words, by manifesting that anticipa-
tory desire vital to Stevens’s prologues and
preludes; when ‘‘Owl’s Clover,’’ ostensibly mouth-
ing a communist position, asserts that ‘‘Everything
is dead / Except the future’’ (154), it could be
speaking a central claim of Stevens’s verse.
The poem finds, however, that this communist
future is not quite the poet’s. Communism builds
‘‘what ought to be’’ (154) rather than what could be
or will be, and desires what should be possible
rather than what is. Its envisioned tomorrow is
terminal, a ‘‘Statue at the World’s End’’ or a Utopia
when time will cease. The last canto of ‘‘The Man
with the Blue Guitar’’ shows that the single dream
of communism, no less than the single dream of
Christianity, can make of ordinary life a single
frustrated hope: the quotidian malady of a long
‘‘avil[ement]’’ (150) that waits for time to cease.
Stevens turns from the statuary of ‘‘Owl’s Clover,’’
then, an art as static as any ‘‘final block,’’ to the
music of ‘‘The Blue Guitar,’’ an art not only accom-
modating but also depending on temporal process.
The desire it plays is not ‘‘final’’ but continuous; the
dream it dreams is not ‘‘only’’ but recurrently
renewed. In place of a politically Utopian paradise,
a timeless state ‘‘without past / And without future’’
(170), this art posits an ordinary globe of repeated
pasts and futures: ‘‘Things as they were, things as
they are,//Things as they will be by and by’’ (146).
‘‘Here’’ (151), Stevens’s lineation emphasizes in the
concluding canto, here is the better life that political
desire would enact, in theordinary repetitive pat-
tern that humans already inhabit. The final stanzas
demonstrate the satisfaction it makes possible,
through the pivotal breaks of ‘‘time//to come,’’
‘‘will be // Our bed,’’ and ‘‘except // The moments’’
(150–51): a slightly unsure pause, before a comfort-
ing turn, suggests the expectation and fulfillment
recurrently found in everyday life.
When Stevens writes in a letter, therefore, that
he believes the better life communists desire is
possible ‘‘within the present frame-work’’ (Letters
351), his statement may bespeak more than the
conservatism of a comfortable insurance executive.
It might also bespeak an honest assessment of that
framework’s possibility. Trusting it could well
seem hollow, and the choice to ‘‘play’’ (Collected
151) reality as one’s own dream could easily seem
like a willed self-delusion: the pretense that Stevens
recommends in a late letter, perhaps, when he
writes that while things ‘‘never go well... you
have to pretend that they do’’ (Letters866). Yet
he adds, in this letter, his belief that ‘‘good fortune
can be worth it,’’ an admission suggesting the
rewards as well as the rigor of the process. To see
the solar ‘‘fortuner’’ (Collected 34) of Crispin’s
quotidian as one’s own imagined ‘‘good fortune’’
is to know a happiness more resilient than any
promised by politics. One will find a ‘‘peace, a
security, a sense of good fortune and of things
that change only slowly,’’ as Stevens writes in
another correspondence, ‘‘so much more certain
than a whole era of Communism could ever give’’
(Letters609–10). Stevens has ‘‘no sympathy with
communism, instead of expectation’’ (350), as
he writes in 1940, because for him communismOf Modern Poetry