Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man": Numbing Void,
Eastern-Inspired Enlightenment, or Overlooked Riddle?
Cathy Lantrip

"The Snow Man" is one of Wallace Stevens' best known and most controversial poems because it is "still astonishing" (Pfau 605) even eight decades after its original publication. It is a poem that challenges readers mentally and provides no easy answers for those who seek to understand it. Indeed the poem's meaning is so open to interpretation that critics often find themselves completely at odds with one another. However, despite or perhaps because of this apparently inherent ambiguity within the poem, "The Snow Man" remains fascinating and thought-provoking.

The poem starts out simply. The vocabulary is undemanding but eloquent, and the tone is clearly solemn, so serious and flat that it borders on apathy. Bevis states that "it is a non-feeling poem about a non-feeling observer of nothing" (259). However, when the opening sentence does not end after the first stanza or even the second, one realizes that this poem is more complex and layered than its beginning indicates.

The first two stanzas contain vivid descriptions of a wintry landscape. For its subject matter, "The Snow Man" is a surprisingly sensual poem. This is not to say that it is in any way erotic or sexual. The poem contains very concrete imagery of a winter landscape. Just reading the descriptions are enough to evoke a chill and send a little shiver down the spine.
The third and fourth stanzas introduce the emotional and mental aspects that had been alluded to in the opening line "One must have a mind of winter." The final stanza is the one that provides the challenge for critics and ordinary readers alike as the poem descends into a string of negative words, leading to an unexpected philosophical dilemma.

The poem is one long, some may say convoluted, sentence that forces the reader "to undergo the experience of waiting before he can understand the opening stanza" (Cameron 586). It is a circular poem that overlaps and twines about itself. The lack of complete sentences within the stanzas drives readers through the poem until they end at the most difficult aspect of the poem--the string of negations in the final stanza. Stevens uses this negative rhetoric to force the reader back through the poem again. One must reread "The Snow Man" from the beginning in light of the ending in order to attempt to understand what it may mean.

This is a poem that forcibly engages the mind. One cannot simply skim the text and then move on with understanding. The poem is arranged in a manner conducive to inspiring confusion and further reflection, and is thus appropriate as part of the canon of a man who critics have dubbed "a dense poet, difficult to comprehend" (Pfau 601). "The Snow Man" must be studied as a whole rather than merely the sum of its parts.

It has been mentioned that critics disagree regarding the proper interpretation of the theme of "The Snow Man." This disagreement generally takes one of two forms, although there is a third novel interpretation that will be discussed later. However, the major two camps are that of reductive angst and that of enlightened transcendence.

Some find "The Snow Man" to be a depressing portrait of "the plight of modern humanity" (Fleming 62), in which we are isolated and cut off from ourselves in addition to everything around us. The poem "tell[s] something about what it means to be separated from one's own experience and therefore diminished" (Cameron 584). We are nothing. The world is nothing. Existence is indistinguishable and nothing, and "there is no entity separate from the speaker, no longer an external snow man, indeed not even a world" (586). There is no meaning to be found in anything (Bevis 259). That void "is such a powerful force that only the strongest can bear to perceive it; furthermore, since it is the only force in the universe, the wise man will worship it, however ironically" (Fleming 62).

Readers dislike this viewpoint and tend to shy away from it. Indeed "English speaking readers seem eager to believe anything else" because we "have trouble with [. . .] an ultimate negative" (Bevis 257). We try to impose our own human values and emotion on the nothingness in order to give it form and meaning and to make it less threatening to us (Randolph 119-120). We argue "that the self, experiencing itself as nothing, is not nothing. [. . .] Nothingness cannot know nothingness, but a self can experience an ‘attitude' of nothingness" (120).

Such an experience of the presence of nothingness and the loss of self may be related to the enlightenment or ecstasy found in Asian thought. Bevis asserts that "the subject of this poem is a certain kind of purification of consciousness" (263) and that after experiencing ecstasy "the person feels he has seen not nothing, but the nothing" (261). A loss of self need not be a negative circumstance. When the loss occurs in conjunction with a sense of unity with something greater, with the nothing that is everything, both present and absent, it can be the ultimate pleasure. All is nothing and nothing is all in total unity (Pfau 604-605). Unlike traditional Western thought, in such a school of philosophy, "paradox does not necessarily destroy being" (Randolph 121).

Finally, there is one third mode of interpretation for the poem which is very different from, and stands as a rebuttal to, the two critical traditions. Whereas the major argument focuses on philosophy, this theory of interpretation puts its emphasis on sentence structure and grammar. Hesla asserts that the critics "have misread some of the poems; and, more importantly, have wanted to impute to Stevens ideas he did not hold, or overlook ideas he did" (241). The traditional interpretations rely on an "if . . . then . . ." hypothetical proposition (242) when the poem's actual structure is inferential and signifies "that from the fact that someone does not or cannot think of any misery in the sound of the wind, it can be inferred that the person has a mind of winter." (250).

If the poem is interpreted in such a manner, its ambiguities become clear and its troublesome negations become clever assertions. The three nothings are ‘somethings' again. The physical surroundings are the "Nothing that is not there" (the double negative making them the something that is there), and real but physically unsubstantial misery is "the nothing that is." The listener who is "nothing himself" "is not a thing" (250-251). He is a person who is able to be emotionally affected by the environment around him (247) and can "behold" both his physical surroundings and misery. According to this interpretation the joke is on the other critics for trying to be too philosophical and attributing too much that is not there to the poem.

I find it fascinating that three so very different interpretations can arise from the same source material and that each of them is so reasonable, notwithstanding the attitudes of the critics towards one another. It is expected that each critic will think that his or her opinion is the only correct one and try to belittle those of everyone else. Wallace Stevens is the only person who really knows what the poem means, of course, and apparently he never elaborated on it or discussed it. Pfau made the interesting comment that "Criticism, it has been said, tells us as much about the critic as it does the critic's subject" (607). I think that is a very telling and accurate statement. I am generally an optimist rather than a pessimist and upon my initial reading of "The Snow Man," before starting my research, I interpreted the listener's state as an enlightened transcendence in which nothing is all and all is nothing, a unity without pleasure or pain in which physical and emotional discomfort are meaningless and nonexistent. I can see the logic behind the other two interpretations now that I am familiar with them but I did not think of them on my own.

Whatever the interpretation, they all suggest a truth that is in some way larger than the self and for that there is an aspect of truth in all of the theories discussed here. None of the three is necessarily right or wrong because they all make sense within the larger context of the poem. The beauty of poetry is that there is room for multiple interpretations and preferences. Even the title, "The Snow Man," reflects the duality of the two dueling critical traditions. A snow man is a cold, inanimate non-being that will eventually become undistinguishable from its reality. However, at the same time it is also a part of the unending, life-sustaining water cycle. A snow man has both negative and positive qualities. It is both nothing and everything.

Works Cited
Bevis, William. "Stevens' Toneless Poetry." ELH 41.2 (1974): 257-286. JSTOR. JSTOR. Christian Brothers University, Memphis, TN. 31 Jan. 2006 <http://www.jstor.org./>.
Cameron, Sharon. "‘The Sense Against Calamity': Ideas of a Self in Three Poems by Wallace Stevens." ELH 43.4 (1976): 584-603. JSTOR. JSTOR. Christian Brothers University, Memphis, TN. 31 Jan. 2006 <http://www.jstor.org./>.
Fleming, Robert E. "Wallace Stevens' ‘The Snow Man' and Hemingway's ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.'" ANQ 2.2 (1989): 61-62. Academic Search Elite. EbscoHost. Christian Brothers University, Memphis, TN. 31 Jan. 2006 <http://search.epnet.com/>.
Hesla, David H. "Singing in Chaos: Wallace Stevens and Three or Four Ideas." American Literature 57.2 (1985): 240-262. Academic Search Elite. EbscoHost. Christian Brothers University, Memphis, TN. 31 Jan. 2006 <http://search.epnet.com/>.
Pfau, Thomas. "Confluences: Reading Wallace Stevens." Southwest Review 84.4 (1999): 601-615. Academic Search Elite. EbscoHost. Christian Brothers University, Memphis, TN. 31 Jan. 2006 <http://search.epnet.com/>.
Randolph, Robert. "‘The Snow Man': Nausea or numin?" ANQ 3.3 (1990): 119-121. Academic Search Elite. EbscoHost. Christian Brothers University, Memphis, TN. 31 Jan. 2006 <http://search.epnet.com/>.
Stevens, Wallace. "The Snow Man." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 1. Eds. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, & Robert O'Clair. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. 247.

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