The Man With the Blue Guitar

"The Man With the Blue Guitar" is a poem published in 1937 by Wallace Stevens. It is divided into thirty-three lengthy sections, and takes the form of an imaginary conversation with the subject of Pablo Picasso's painting The Old Guitarist. In the poem, an unnamed "they" says, of the man, "you do not play things as they are", sparking a prolonged meditation on the nature of art, performance, and imagination.

Stevens began writing the poem in December 1936, not long after his completion of the poetry collection Owl's Clover in the spring of that year. "The Man With the Blue Guitar" became his most successful long poem to date, and William Carlos Williams wrote at the time that he considered it one of Stevens's best works.