# Reading > Poems, Poets, and Poetry >  The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens

## Sitaram

http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/...vens.Snowman.h

tml

Wallace Stevens 
(1879-1955)



The Snow Man 
One must have a mind of winter 
To regard the frost and the boughs 
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; 

And have been cold a long time 
To behold the junipers shagged with ice, 
The spruces rough in the distant glitter 

Of the January sun; and not to think 
Of any misery in the sound of the wind, 
In the sound of a few leaves, 

Which is the sound of the land 
Full of the same wind 
That is blowing in the same bare place 

For the listener, who listens in the snow, 
And, nothing himself, beholds 
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. 


-- from Harmonium , 1923 

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http://knitandcontemplation.typepad....re_on_the.html

Commentary by Robert Pack:

(excerpts):

In the remarkable poem "The Snow Man," Stevens dramatizes the 
action of a mind as it becomes one with the scene it perceives, and at 
that instant, the mind having ceased to bring something of itself to 
the scene, the scene then ceases to exist fully.


We, with the "one" of the poem, begin by watching the winter scene 
while in our mind the connotations of misery and cold brought forth by 
the scene are stirring. 

But gradually, almost imperceptibly, we are divested of whatever it is 
that distinguishes us from the snow man. We become the snow man, 
and we see the winter world through his eyes of coal, and we know 
the cold without the thoughts of human discomfort. 

To perceive the winter scene truly, we must have the mind of the 
snow man, until correspondence becomes identification. Then we see 
with the sharpest eye the images of winter: "pine-trees crusted with 
snow," "junipers shagged with ice," "spruces rough in the distant 
glitter/ Of the January sun." We hear with the acutest ear the cold 
sibilants evoking the sense of barrenness and monotony: "sound of 
the wind," "sound of a few leaves," "sound of the land," "same wind," 
"same bare place," "For the listener, who listens in the snow." 

The "one" with whom the reader has identified himself has now 
become "the listener, who listens in the snow"; he has become the 
snow man, and he knows winter with a mind of winter, knows it in its 
strictest reality, stripped of all imagination and human feeling. But at 
that point when he sees the winter scene reduced to absolute fact, as 
the object not of the mind, but of the perfect perceptual eye that sees 
"nothing that is not there," then the scene, devoid of its imaginative 
correspondences, has become "the nothing that is."


From Wallace Stevens: An approach to his poetry and thought. New 
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1958. 

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http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minst...oems/1432.html


I think, one of the themes of the poem is just the approach towards 
reality, the conflict between the rational consciousness of the 
existential "void", between the will to see things as they are, and the 
innate human tendency to create worlds (even poetic ones), to 
reinterpret what we see in artistic (or philosophical, or moral) terms. 

After reading the poem one wonders who the
"snow man" is. I think it is a negative term of comparison; it is what 
man cannot be, what a poet can surely never become. Much more is 
suggested, if not discussed: the misery of human condition; the 
natural, emotional bond between man and nature, the "emptiness 
within" of the twentieth century man. 

In the end there is the enigma of the interpretation of the first line. 

"One must have a mind of winter" to look at the spectacle of winter 
nature and not to think of human condition.

What is the meaning? Is it an invitation in philosophical and artistic 
terms to look at reality without superimposing interpretations on it? 

Or is it a deduction that only "snow men" can do so? That real men 
create the landscape, the "reality" they see, artistically, conceptually, 
morally?

The last line reminds me of the following passage from Chesterton's 
Father Brown story "The Wrong Shape":

"When that Indian spoke to us," went on Brown in a conversational
undertone, "I had a sort of vision, a vision of him and all his universe.
Yet he only said the same thing three times. When first he said 'I want 
nothing,' it meant only that he was impenetrable, that Asia does not 
give itself away. Then he said again, 'I want nothing,' and I knew that 
he meant that he was sufficient to himself, like a cosmos, that he 
needed no God, neither admitted any sins. And when he said the third 
time, 'I want nothing,' he said it with blazing eyes. And I knew that he 
meant literally what he said; that nothing was his desire and his 
home; that he was weary for nothing as for wine; that annihilation, 
the mere destruction of everything or anything--"


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http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poe...ns/snowman.htm

Robert Pack

In the remarkable poem "The Snow man," Steven dramatizes the 
action of a mind as it becomes one with the scene it perceives, and at 
that instant, the mind having ceased to bring something of itself to 
the scene, the scene then ceases to exist fully.

We, with the "one" of the poem, begin by watching the winter scene 
while in our mind the connotations of misery and cold brought forth by 
the scene are stirring. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, we are 
divested of whatever it is that distinguishes us from the snow man. 

We become the snow man, and we see the winter world through his 
eyes of coal, and we know the cold without the thoughts of human 
discomfort. To perceive the winter scene truly, we must have the mind 
of the snow man, until correspondence becomes identification. Then 
we see with the sharpest eye the images of winter: "pine-trees 
crusted with snow," "junipers shagged with ice," "spruces rough in the 
distant glitter/ Of the January sun." We hear with the acutest ear the 
cold sibilants evoking the sense of barrenness and monotony: "sound 
of the wind," "sound of a few leaves," "sound of the land," "same 
wind," "same bare place," "For the listener, who listens in the snow." 

The "one" with whom the reader has identified himself has now 
become "the listener, who listens in the snow"; he has become the 
snow man, and he knows winter with a mind of winter, knows it in its 
strictest reality, stripped of all imagination and human feeling. But at 
that point when he sees the winter scene reduced to absolute fact, as 
the object not of the mind, but of the perfect perceptual eye that sees 
"nothing that is not there," then the scene, devoid of its imaginative 
correspondences, has become "the nothing that is."

From Wallace Stevens: An approach to his poetry and thought. New 
Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1958. 


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David Perkins

We may note that the poem posits two types of listener. One would 
hear a "misery in the sound of the wind." Through his own imaginative 
creativity he would project a human emotion into the scene and 
locate it there. Thus, he would make the landscape one with which 
human beings can feel sympathy. The other listener would hear 
nothing more than the sound of the wind. He would exert none of this 
spontaneous and almost inevitable creativity. The poem embodies 
Stevens central theme, the relation between imagination and reality. 
Endless permutations of this theme were possible. Was reality the 
world seen without imagination? If so, was imagination the world 
seen without reality? That was a bitter truth, if it was the truth. But 
perhaps the snowman, who heard no "misery" in the wind, was 
projecting himself into the scene just as much as the other listener. 

Perhaps the snowman beheld nothing only because he was "nothing 
himself," since, to cite a later poem, whoever "puts a pineapple 
together" always sees it "in the tangent of himself."

from David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to 
the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1976), 542-544.


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## Sitaram

Pat Righelato

This is not a grandiose claim for the infinite extent of consciousness, 
but it is nevertheless a heroic effort of perception, a Modernist 
reassessment of Transcendentalist vision, a revision of Emersons 
ecstatic merging in the more sustained awareness of the separation 
of consciousness and nature. Stevens is trying to make a new 
intelligence prevail, an intelligence which understands the strategies 
of consciousness as fictions rather than religious truths.


From Righelato, Pat, "Wallace Stevens." In American Poetry: The 
Modernist Ideal. Ed. Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty. New York: St. 
Martins Press, 1995. Ó 1995 The Editorial Board Lumiere 
(Cooperative Press) Ltd.


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Anthony Whiting

Stevens' use of the word "behold" also contributes to the sense that 
the mind is apprehending the larger universe at the end of "The Snow 
Man." "Behold" suggests in addition that Stevens views this 
apprehension as an extraordinary moment of heightened intensity. As 
well as expressing a sense of possession, the word "behold" also 
expresses a sense of revelation, in the biblical sense of the revelation 
of extraordinary things. We "behold" acts of God, miracles, mysteries. 

"Behold," God said after creating the world, "I have given you every 
herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every 
tree" (Gen. 1:29). As "The Snow Man " moves toward its reductive 
extreme, the perspective widens and the tone of the poem becomes 
elevated and more serious. At the poem's conclusion, "the nothing 
that is," pure being, is beheld, magisterially "revealed" and 
"possessed." . . .

from The Never-Resting Mind: Wallace Stevens' Romantic Irony. 

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John Gery

Prompted by the clarity of the poem's first line, once we make the 
deceptively easy leap to a mind of winter we gain the power to 
perform three acts: "to regard" (an act both physical and cerebral), "to 
behold" (a physical act only), and "not to think" (an act most assuredly 
cerebral yet one that Stevens simultaneously negates). In a mind of 
winter, one can "regard" the scene before him or her, and if one has 
been "cold a long time" then he or she can look at that scene without 
thinking "of any misery" in its sights and sounds. Of course, not to 
attribute any emotional qualities to a landscape as a viewer perceives 
it is to be not a human but a "'snow man, so what the poet asks of us 
is possible only within the imagination.

From Ways of Nothingness: Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary 
American Poetry. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996

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Beverly Maeder

Timothy Bahti has written that when we consider the poem as it 
moves across its formal space from beginning to end/ending, the 
effect of the "logic of this turn in the middle . . . is to call the scene to 
the mind and, in the immediate negation, to call the mind away from 
it. It is an abstraction that renders concrete." Human consciousness in 
such a reading is drawn away from the sound of the wind and the 
concatenation that ensues. The imagined subject's reaction is defined 
only in terms of its negation: not thinking of a human emotion, 
"misery." This would be what it is to have a mind of winter or, as 
Macksey suggests in one of the earlier phenomenological 
interpretations, to practice the "chastity of the intellect" that is the 
kernel of Santayana's definition of skepticism. It keeps the 
hypothetical subject of consciousness--a snow man like the 
title's--safe from projecting himself onto the scene or confusing his 
own emotions (if he has any) with the nature of his surroundings.


It is in part because of the fullness of the first half that we notice the 
spareness of the second half and shift our attention from the 
luxuriance of lexis in the first to the intricacy of syntactic repetitions 
and relations in the second. If we can have a mind of winter, not 
seeing this as "misery" is one of the non-ontological activities the 
poem invites us to participate in. Like the jar represented in 

"Anecdote of the Jar," the poem can be understood as not "giv[ing] of 
bird or bush" while yet having "dominion" over all: its representational 
authority over nature is ambivalent, while its patterned word-world is 
clearly the sign of the power of artifice and of the artificer to create 
this syntactical thing.

Many critics have considered that the principal metaphysical allusion 
in "The Snow Man" is Emerson's "Nature," in particular the famous  
passage in which Emerson describes himself crossing a bare 
Common, and finding himself on "bare ground' where he be comes 
one with nature, through the vehicle of his "transparent eyeball." "I 
am nothing," he says; "I see all." 

From Wallace Stevens Experimental Language: The Lion in the Lute. 
New York: St. Martins Press, 1999. 

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B.J. Leggett

One of the most frequently cited of the early poems of epistemology, 
"The Snow Man" (CP, 9) asks whether a world could remain over if 
point of view were canceled or what the features of a perspectiveless 
world might he. "The Snow Man" has been cited in support of any 
number of disparate interpretations of Stevens, although it has most 
frequently been given a realist reading, as an "affirmation of primal 
reality" (Litz, 100) or a "'plain reality' which harbors no mystical . . . 
element" (Leonard and Wharton, 65). In an influential early essay J. 

Hillis Miller identified the poem's "nothing" with being and argued that 
for Stevens nothingness is the underlying reality, "the source and end 
of everything" (Poetry of Being, 155). In Paul Bové's more recent 

Heideggerian reading the poem is said to record the process by which 
its speaker "sees the primordiality of Being-in-the-World" and learns 
that "he is ontologically identical with the other insofar as they are 
both part of 'what-is' existing in and by virtue of 'nothing'" (Destructive 
Poetics, 191). Against Miller and Bové I will argue that the "nothing" of 
the poem may be read with less strain as Nietzsche's featureless 
becoming, the ground upon which we construct our worlds. . . .



But of course we learn eventually that if a mind of winter were 
achieved, the snowman would not in fact regard pine trees, junipers, 
or spruces, since these designations are the most elementary 
examples of human abstraction and classification. Neither would he 
behold objects that are crusted, shagged, or glittering--all metaphors 
imposed on the scene. He would not see these objects in the light of a 

January sun, time and its divisions constituting another human 
ordering. He would not be aware that the spruces are being observed 
in the "distant glitter," since the concept of distance assumes a point 
of view. In brief, the qualities of the scene that interest us, that are 
described in such a way that they constitute the motive for assuming 
a particular kind of mental state, are precisely what are lost when this 
state is realized. The argument of the poem may thus be reduced to 
this form: in order to realize x, surrender the faculties by which x is 
realized.

The poem attempts to get rid of a manmade world but its language 
keeps reasserting what it relinquishes and thereby reveals what a 
much later text says outright: "the absence of the imagination had / 
Itself to be imagined" (CP, 503). . . 

Excerpted from a longer analysis in Early Stevens: The Nietzschean 
Intertext.

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## Sitaram

The "sound of the wind" that is also "the sound of the land" serves as the ultimate grounding of the poem's landscape, of the poem's cosmos. It is that sound to which "the listener . . . listens," and it is that listeningas listening, a concentration beyond thought, a concentration transcending the ordinary mental noise which flashes through our heads each secondthat leads to the epiphany of the poem's final line: the "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." This is a state of mind which various systems of Yoga refer to as samadhi. Samadhi can be variously translated as deep equanimity of mind, meditation in which the mind is quieted to the point of stillness and "one-pointedness," and apotheosis or union with divinity (samtogether with + adhiLord or divinity).1 It is also explained as a synthesis, a putting of the mind, or intellect, together in a unified meditative state through a contemplation of the divine (samtogether + a + dhimind or intellect). This state of mind, this samadhi, can be arrived at through sound; specifically, this means through the use of external sound to still the internal sounds of the mind, to still the steady stream of conscious thought (the thought that would lead to thinking of "misery in the sound of the wind"), until finally a state of quiet repose, contemplation, and sharply reduced or even eliminated sense of separation and duality is reached. This is the state in which "One," as a "listener" may behold the "Nothing that is not there," realize, in other words, the illusory nature of such separations as I and Thou, I and It, I and not-I. This is also the state in which "One," as a "listener" may behold the "nothing that is," the no-thing of the via negativa, the nirguna brahman (brahmangod, or divinity, or ground of "reality," nirwithout, gunaattributes), the "not-god, not-ghost, apersonal, formless" No-thing of Meister Eckhart.

http://www.brysons.net/academic/snowman.html

http://www.rzc.org/html/library/zenbow/laymanpang.shtml

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## Sitaram

http://teacherweb.ftl.pinecrest.edu/...onal/paper.htm

Defining [a poem] freezes it into immobility, Stevens reasoned to publishers three years prior to his death, expressing a view characteristic of even his first poems (qtd. in The Music of What Happens 79). Bewitched by the harmony of fiction and truth and the notes formed in the blur between their boundaries, Stevens is now a staple in the diets of many of today's post-modern poets (John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Jorie Graham) who also promote literature as a continual dialogue rather than a statement or narrative. Stevens's poetry enacts a mental process(Vendler, Music 78); he is always more concerned with the process of reading a poem than with any answers derived from a reading. To Stevens, immobility defines the death of both poem and reader, and to prevent such a death he injects a tension into his work in the form of a juxtaposition of truth and fiction. This complexity creates for the reader a perpetual balancing act between truth and fiction addressed by virtually every Stevens's critic. What is not addressed by these critics, however, is that this harmony, Stevens's trademark ingredient for supreme fiction, is a metaphor for life that in the early twentieth century beckoned a new demand on all poetry to follow.

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## mono

Out of curiosity, I researched into more of Wallace Steven's work, of whom I had previously read very little. Thank you, Sitaram, for introducing me to more of his enlightening poetry. Additionally, I found this fascinating link: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilre...onversion.html
A few of my favorites:

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

---

Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

---

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

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