by Wallace Stevens
Stevens's long argument with a guitarist who will not play things as they are — the poem that carried Picasso's blue musician into American verse, whether or not Stevens meant any single painting.
Across thirty-three short cantos, a crowd demands that a guitarist play things as they are, and the guitarist answers that things as they are, are changed when played. That exchange is the whole engine of the poem. Stevens turns it over and over, a figure practicing scales, and out of the repetition builds his most sustained case for the imagination: art does not copy the world, it remakes it, and the remaking is not a betrayal.
Readers have set the poem beside Picasso's Old Guitarist since 1937. Stevens resisted, insisting that no single painting stood behind it, and later discouraged pairing the book with a Picasso reproduction. We record the connection the way the scholarship holds it: probable, productive, contested at the edges.
What no one contests is the chain it started. Forty years on, David Hockney etched his answer to both.
1937
Wallace Stevens published the poem — thirty-three short cantos — in the collection The Man with the Blue Guitar (Alfred A. Knopf).
1976–77
David Hockney made his etching portfolio The Blue Guitar in response to the poem, naming the Picasso–Stevens chain on its title page.
The American poet Wallace Stevens, who published it in 1937.
A guitarist whose blue guitar changes “things as they are” — a long argument, in thirty-three short cantos, about whether art should reproduce reality or transform it.
Readers connect it to Picasso's blue-period Old Guitarist, but Stevens denied that any single Picasso lay behind it. The colour, the guitar and the theme keep the two works in conversation anyway.
As thirty-three numbered cantos, most in short rhyming couplets, circling the same argument rather than telling a story.
Hockney's 1976–77 etching portfolio The Blue Guitar was made in response to the poem; its title page spells out the lineage from Picasso to Stevens to Hockney.
Responds to · 1937
Read alongside the painting since publication — the bent blue guitarist, the color, the title — but Stevens resisted naming any single Picasso as the source and later discouraged pairing the book with a Picasso reproduction. Probable, productive, contested at the edges.
Answered by · 1976–1977
The portfolio's own title page states the lineage — etchings by David Hockney, who was inspired by Wallace Stevens, who was inspired by Pablo Picasso.