The Snow Man

The Snow Man is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, "Harmonium". It was first published in 1921 [In the journal "Poetry," volume 19, October 1921.] and is therefore in the public domain.

Overview

John Serio reports that Jay Keyser, in a broadcast on National Public Radio, declared “The Snow Man” to be “the best short poem in the English language bar none” [“All Things Considered,” NPR [November 29, 2005] .]

Sometimes classified as one of Stevens' "poems of epistemology", it can be read as an expression of the naturalistic skepticism that he absorbed from his friend and mentor, Santayana. It is skeptical that anything can be known about a substantial self (Santayana was an epiphenomenalist) or indeed about substances in the world apart from the perspectives that human imagination brings to "the nothing that is" when it perceives "junipers shagged with ice", etc. There is something wintry about this insight, which Stevens captures in "The Necessary Angel" by writing, "The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us." [Stevens, p. 169.]

The poem is an expression of Stevens' perspectivism, leading from a relatively objective description of a winter scene to a relatively subjective emotional response (thinking of misery in the sound of the wind), to the final idea that the listener and the world itself are "nothing" apart from these perspectives. See Gubbinal and Nuances of a theme by Williams for comparisons.

B.J. Leggett construes Stevens's perspectivism as commitment to the principle that "instead of facts we have perspectives, none privileged over the others as truer or more nearly in accord with things as they are, although not for that reason all equal." [Leggett, p. 6.] This principle that "underlies Nietzschean thought" is central to Leggett's reading. [Stevens. H., p. 432: "The incessant job is to get into focus, not out of focus. Nietzsche is as perfect a means of getting out of focus as a little bit too much to drink." (Letter from Wallace Stevens to Hi Simons, Jaunary 12, 1943)] It may be observed that Stevens's remark in the passage quoted above from "The Necessary Angel" falls short of conforming to that principle, implying a condition of `the world about us' that is distinct from the perspectives we bring to it.

Notes

References

• Serio, John. "Introduction". 2007: Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens.
• Stevens. H. Letters of Wallace Stevens. 1966: University of California Press.
• Leggett, B.J. "Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext". 1992: Duke University Press.
• Stevens, Wallace. "The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination". 1942: Vintage.