Date Thesis Awarded

4-2014

Access Type

Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only

Degree Name

Bachelors of Arts (BA)

Department

English

Advisor

Henry Hart

Committee Members

Christy Burns

Charles Palermo

Abstract

Throughout his career, the American Modernist poet Wallace Stevens engaged painting as a metaphor and analog for his poetic process. For Stevens, both poet and painter create art through an effort of the mind as it interacts with the raw material of reality. The poet concerns himself with language, the painter with form and color, but the concern of rendering a reality that displays a dynamic relation between an imaginative inner world and the artist’s surroundings pertains to both. My project explores the poem "The Man with the Blue Guitar" as a pivotal composition in the development of Stevens' use of painting as it reflects painterly influences from both his early and late career and a varied array of movements from Impressionism to Surrealism.

Recommended Citation

Sweet, Olivia, "“Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar”: Wallace Stevens and the Visual Arts" (2014). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 52.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/52