"Stevens was an heir of the contemplative minority and his work is the record of his progress in a faith whose existence and whose object could be defined, the old defining words being dead, only in the new words of his poetry."

-- Lucy Beckett on Wallace Stevens, 1974.

Introduction

Wallace Stevens’s poetry has an obvious truth that takes on special meaning. The subject about which he wrote was the mind of a mysterious creator of poetry. He tried to catch with language the act of imagining. In his works Wallace Stevens explored the interaction of reality and the human perception of what reality is. Wallace Stevens is critically regarded as one of the most significant American poets of the twentieth century.

Biography

Stevens was born in Reading Pennsylvania on October 2, 1879. His father was a prosperous country lawyer. Wallace Stevens enrolled at Harvard College in 1983, but he left Harvard without a degree in 1900. After leaving school he worked as a reporter for the New York Tribune. He then earned a law degree from New York Law School. Stevens was admitted to the U.S. Bar in 1904. Wallace Stevens became vice president at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. Stevens began to establish an identity for himself as a poet when Harriet Monroe included four of his poems in a wartime issue of Poetry. At the age of forty-four Wallace Stevens published his first collection of poems Harmonium in 1923. It sold only one hundred copies and was largely ignored. In 1931 Harmonium was reprinted and it received more critical attention and recognition.

Literary Career

Wallace Stevens’ major works include Idea of Order (1935), The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937). Stevens’s book of war poems is Parts of a World (1942). Following that book was Transport to Summer (1947), The Auroras of Autumn (1950), and The Necessary Angel (1951). In 1954 his Collected Poems was published. He did not receive widespread recognition until that publication. For the publication he was awarded both the Nation Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Wallace Stevens died in 1955.

Editors Views

In his book Harmonium the poem "The Snow Man" has a sorrow and mournful feel to it. Stevens’ poetry incorporates psychological elements as he laments the dead. "The Snow Man" represents an effort to imitate a winter landscape and the psychological basis on which we imitate it gives us a false idea . In this poem imitation is the principle that links inner and outer reality. An example of this is the links of "mind" to winter". Stevens makes concrete his sense of death as a loss of boundaries between self and world. This poem is an expansion into nature."The Snow Man" rehearses the idea of death. In the poem "The Snow Man" this line has a big meaning; "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is" (Stevens 12). This represents this dead landscape and Stevens is backing up this idea of nothingness with this line. This poem has a sense of loneness and death. "One must have a mind of winter" the "One" hears the "sound of the wind" and it beholds this wintry landscape. Death is commonly associated with winter. A lot of elements in this poem function as a symbol for death for example cold, snow, and winter. Stevens’ "The Snow Man" characterizes the feeling of severe depression; that validates the mournfulness while he questions it.

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.
 

Works Cited

Beckett, Lucy. Wallace Stevens. London: Cambridge University Press, 1974.

    This book has Wallace Stevens’ biography information and also excerpts from certain poems with some
    critical analysis of the poems.

Buttell, Robert. Wallace Stevens: the making of Harmonium. Princeton, N.J.,: Prinction University Press, 1967.

    This book explains all about how the book Harmonium came to be.

Ramazani, Jahan. "Elegy and anti-elegy in Stevens’ ‘Harmonium’." Journal of Modern Literature. 17.4 (Spring 1991): 567-583.

    This is a criticism that includes a lot of information about the relation of the poems with the theme death.

Stevens, Wallace. Harmonium. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1923.

    I got the text from this.

"Wallace Stevens." America Online. 27 Jan. 2000.  www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/stevens/stevens.htm

    This web site has very good biographical information in it.

www.angelfire.com/va/uey839/frosty.html

    I got the picture from this web site.