Stevens’ “The Man with the Blue Guitar” and Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror”: Addressing the Audience

And am I wrong to worship whereFaith cannot doubt nor Hope despairSince my own soul can grant my prayer?Speak, God of Visions, plead for meAnd tell why I have chosen thee.

—Emily Brontë

IF WALLACE STEVENS ever read Emily Brontë’s poem, we suspect he would have understood her question rhetorically. “No,” the artist is not wrong to worship the imagination. God and the Imagination are one; we have the power to fulfill our own desires. Right and “wrong” here would concern metaphysical belief, not ethics. Stevens would of course “come back” often to the base of a world beyond imagination but his faith and hope rested in his creative powers.

But the poem serves as the epigraph for W. H. Auden’s “The Sea and the Mirror” and in this context its meaning is less self-evident, its question less settled. Indeed, Lucy McDiarmid has suggested that Auden’s poem answers “Yes” to Brontë’s poem: yes, it is wrong to worship art, or to invest one’s hope in the fabrications of one’s own soul, a version of what Auden thought of as magical thinking (McDiarmid 117). In “The Sea and the Mirror” Auden sees art, McDiarmid argues, as a means to warn us of our limits, our vanity, and our need for community and supernatural grace (McDiarmid 98–118). Arthur Kirsch agrees: Auden designed the poem to show that God and truth exceed the powers of the imagination and cannot be represented in art (xi–xxxvii). These remain “silen[t]” “On the other side of the wall” (ACP 404).¹

Brontë’s lines refer to the source and sufficiency of imaginative power, but they also raise questions about the direction of art and the nature of audience. Pursuing the objectives of “pure poetry,” however modified, Stevens tended to view art as self-delighting; poetry is essentially a private affair between the poet and his own soul or muse; poems are love letters to the interior paramour, or to the one of fictive music. Auden, on the other hand, seems always to have been performing for a group audience, whether a few friends or a wide congregation; even his prayers and love poems often sound like public speech.

And yet both Stevens and Auden were dialectical thinkers, so it is not surprising to discover points where they express ideas and take on stances opposite to their primary inclinations as artists. Stevens’ preface to Ideas of Order reaffirms the commitment that “the poet should be the exponent of the imagination” for society. “The more realistic life may be, the more it needs the stimulus of the imagination” (CPP 997). Yet this very argument asserts that the poet is in some sense answerable to society, that he must, as in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “[turn] / Toward the town,” and not only linger on the beach creating the world in which he walks (CPP 106). He is sailing, in “Farewell to Florida,” toward a world of “men in crowds,” however ambivalently (CPP 98). Conversely, Auden, having dedicated himself through much of the 1930s to writing that would call attention to urgent social and economic issues, began in the 1940s to turn away from the idea of poetry as a tool of social action. Art should instead “Teach the free man how to praise” and enrich the spiritual lives of individuals (ACP 249). It is not as though these poets reversed position. Stevens is still the poet making words out of desire, while Auden is still in many ways a didactic poet, trying to find and form a viable community. But in midcareer each came a degree closer to the position of the other, especially with regard to the artist’s relation to audience.

We can see not only dialectical but dialogical tendencies clearly in two major works written in times of great “pressure of reality,” times that provoke the artist to analyze and to defend his role in society (CPP 665). “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” written during the...