Stevens and Stevenson

W E have proof both that Wallace Stevens read Robert Louis Al 7 Stevenson's Providence and the Guitar1 and that it prompted in him a deeply critical response regarding the nature and worth of literature. We also have evidence that Stevens read the issue of Cahiers d'Art which included an article by Andre Breton entitled Poete.2 As Susan B. Weston convincingly argues, when Stevens wrote The Man with the Blue Guitar, he may have been working less from a visual influence than from a medium that provoked his imagination-that is, the ''sources of Stevens' poem may include a particular description of Picasso that conflates the roles of poet and guitarist in an explanation of his pictorial art rather than Picasso's paintings, as has been traditionally assumed.3 If Weston is right, then it is likely that this article provided both the imagery and the phraseology for reviving Stevens' reaction to that earlier verbal medium, Providence and the Guitar. For, as I wish to show, the influence of this now little-known short story (however ironic that influence may be) on Stevens' work proves to be both subtle and pervasive, informing first his prose, then later a number of poems, including, most notably, The Man with the Blue Guitar

Art · French Literature and Poetry · Literature, Politics, and Exile Studies · Poetry Analysis and Criticism