"The Snow Man" is a poem from

Wallace Stevens Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance compa ...

's first book of poetry, ''

Harmonium The pump organ is a type of free-reed organ that generates sound as air flows past a vibrating piece of thin metal in a frame. The piece of metal is called a reed. Specific types of pump organ include the reed organ, harmonium, and melodeon. Th ...

'', first published in the October 1921 issue of the journal ''Poetry''.

Overview

Sometimes classified as one of Stevens' "poems of

epistemology Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Epis ...

", it can be read as an expression of the naturalistic skepticism that he absorbed from his friend and mentor

George Santayana Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English as George Santayana (; December 16, 1863 – September 26, 1952), was a Spanish and US-American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. Born in Spain, Santayana was raised ...

. It is doubtful that anything can be known about a substantial self (Santayana was an

epiphenomenalist Epiphenomenalism is a position on the mind–body problem which holds that physical and biochemical events within the human body ( sense organs, neural impulses, and muscle contractions, for example) are the sole cause of mental events (thought, ...

) 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." 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. Stevens has the world look at winter from a different point of view. When thinking of winter, one might think of a harsh storm. One might also think snow and ice to be a nuisance. Stevens wants people to see the opposite view. He wants the world to look at winter in a sense of optimism and beauty. He creates a difference between imagination and reality. 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." This principle that "underlies

Nietzschean Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) developed his philosophy during the late 19th century. He owed the awakening of his philosophical interest to reading Arthur Schopenhauer's ''Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung'' (''The World as Will and Represe ...

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 Henry Church, December 8, 1942) 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

''The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens'', New York: Vintage Books, 1954.

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. {{DEFAULTSORT:Snow Man 1921 poems American poems Poetry by Wallace Stevens Modernist poems