Poem of the Day: ‘The Snow Man’

“The Snow Man” appeared in Poetry magazine in 1921 and then in the 1923 “Harmonium,” the first book of poetry from Wallace Stevens (1879–1955). The book was not a success, and Stevens made sure with his magazine publications that poetry readers saw just how good he was before publishing his next books, especially “Ideas of Order” (1936) and “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (1937).

Probably by the time of Stevens’s death — and certainly by the 1970s — some of the poems from “Harmonium” had become part of the canon of English verse. Here at the Sun, we’ve already run “The Emperor of Ice Cream” and “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” from that first book of his poetry. But there may be no clearer example of Stevens’s ascent in reputation than “The Snow Man,” which is now inescapable, reprinted in any standard anthology as the opening of Stevens’s greatest hits — and Poem of the Day here on Stevens’s birthday, October 2.

It’s usual these days to take “The Snow Man” as a poem of epistemology, an examination of how we know. And that’s not a bad reading, given the poem’s famous opening, “One must have a mind of winter.” But given the poem’s equally famous conclusion, “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,” Stevens is out after bigger game: Not simply the easy “Gosh, maybe things aren’t quite what they seem,” but the more difficult metaphysical question of what is real, such that we might misapprehend it.

In this reading, the key word is “misery.” The poem has five three-line stanzas of free verse, tempered enough by internal rhymes and near-rhymes, and a mostly iambic meter, to give a hint of a formal poem. Stevens uses the poem to suggest that the human observer brings emotion to reality — seeing through emotive lenses.