This is just a synopsis

Thank you

I really appreciate this viewpoint on the story

Thnx for the video ❤

Thank you, Dr. Davis. I suggest that this poem is best understood through several Stevens poems, which many speak to pure reality (winter) and pure imagination (summer). Winter is without imagination, an "inert savoir" after what "so long ago" was imagined no longer holds. This loss, starting in late summer and throughout autumn in his poems, leads to a purification in winter when reality is experienced 'is as it is' without imagination, without a perceiver, a loss of self ("One") during a full absorption with reality. A 'falsifying eye' (Emerson) removed that exists in our imperfections, which permeate our imagination; "which is so hot in us". The weight of reality (existing conceptions) and the never resting mind give way to "the distant glitter / Of the January sun' ("a scrawny cry"). The 'listener' experiences unmediated reality ("a plain sense of it") without pre-existing conceptions of the 'our climate' before the imagination, the 'first idea', glitters once again in late winter and grows in early spring. The seasons are necessary, winter is necessary for imagination. Winter is cyclical baptismal for our lack or loss of vitality (the "vital I", "I" being the self and the imagination, they are one). Thus one must have a "mind of winter' to 'regard'. "the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined." "Required, as a necessity requires." ""the imperfect is our paradise"

You should know the 'Nothing' from the Zen ' standpoint'

you are so stunning that you have made me love it and opened new vistas how human mind gets involved with its complexities and their perspective of seeing a thing.

In this poem, the snow man represents a kind of pure, uncorrupted consciousness that knows--or "beholds"--only one thing: the present moment. It is a consciousness incapable of comparison, since it knows no other experience than the "winter" that it inhabits (and that inhabits its mind). It "Beholds nothing that is not there." In other words, it is incapable of complicated thought, of discernment. It is incapable of philosophical thinking. All it can do is BE--and behold--in the present moment, which means that only its kind of elemental consciousness, lacking the capacity to contrast its experience with other experiences, and thus lacking the capacity to subjectively interpret the winter scene as containing "misery," is able to behold "the nothing that is." Therefore, it is ridiculous to claim that the snow man is the poem's speaker. The snow man is presented as having exactly the sort of mind that would make it, by definition, incapable of conceiving of the ideas expressed in "The Snow Man."

Appreciate your work! Thank you!

Did you pass the class? And are you teaching now? I am nearly finished with the same course.

Where can I find actually an original story itself. To interpret it myself? I was looking online in libraries, but didn't find. Today we have so many interpreters that are bringing their own morden ideas. Which Andersen never ment.

Yummy yum yoga nice butt!

glad i foiund your channel! i really enjoyed this session. cant wait for more!

U r Bard of Avon

Excellent ❤

Fantastic ❤

Merci

It's really helpful！Thank you！

Nice do you teach private yoga sessions on zoom

Beautiful ❤

Awsome class. 🎉

Beautiful 8:00

oh God help me once I finish my english i will never read these stories again.

I personally prefer a more queer interpetation. Genderqueerness and the process of coming out. However, I do enjoy seeing different perspectives, and I can definitely see the feminist interpretation of this story.

Laura excellent lecture! I am from Brazil and love it American poetry. How can I found a school /college or online class to learn more and dedicated to studying more?

This is really helpful for my study, thank you!

Interest analysis! It helped me s lot to understand the lecture for my class 😊

is it REALLY true the Prince didnt love her? and was her gaining human legs more about exploring the land world above? its disappointing to learn that this is such a cynical story, it seems Hans Christian didnt believe in happy endings (& not just in this tale) for me changes/adaptations, that have been made over the years have been for the better, in this story she had earned the right to happiness (if it has to be earned) I wonder if Anderson is making a judgement about expecting too much in life, especially as you say the sisters having travelled to the land world, all decide to go back to the ocean. Where as the Disney versions change "the 3rd act" to a happy ending that's preferable, I always think that stories set in other times in history work much better for having happy endings (especially to do with love)(ie the film SOMEWHERE IN TIME)because people were far less cynical than today, particularly among the working class who had no reputation to maintain unlike the affluent middle class & the Aristocratic who as today have often lost their souls. what is most ironic is that MERMAID mythology says they were sea sirens that sang, luring Mariners to their deaths on rocks.

Thank you for your lecture.🙏

Was "feminism"even a word when this tale was written ??

Thank you for this beautiful lecture. I have consulted many videos analyzing the various approaches one can choose to assign meaning to the little mermaid. I appreciate this feminist interpretation very much. Keeping in mind Andersen's unrequited love story with his friend Edward, the tale invites many more interpretations. I am glad i have come across your lecture and thank you once again for the insights it has given me and the stimuli it has provided me with for further analysis 🙏❤️

I'm all for the feminist take, but in focusing in what she gives up for the man in this story, we're overlooking how she's actually using the man for her own gain (to join the human world and get an immortal soul). To me this is a story that shows us immature, selfish love, where one looks to an object of infatuation to complete them, and in the end, when she chooses not to kill him, she's finally learned how loving others requires self-actualization.

Hi, you should really be doing a lecture on Emily Dickinson. I think she is unsurpassed still by any poet even T.S Eliot or Stevens.

Are Aunts allowed to *read newspapers, classics, the Bible, (whatever they like?) Because reading and writing lists and teaching plans is oh so very different?

how do they choose Handmaid’s, now? in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, Gilead had a whole host of childbearing women, and even more importantly, they had a horrifying host of ‘misdeeds’, some of which, such as breaking up a marriage, as June had done, to having had an abortion, Jeanine’s crime after being the victim of a gang rape, to being gay. where are they going to pluck these Handmaid’s from…now that Gilead no longer has millions of free women to choose from…? I was wondering about that independently of ‘The Testaments’-by virtue of the fact that everyone in Gilead has been raised, well-in Gilead! (-where are these not at all sterile transgressors, now?)

Excellent summary!

When you said feminist you lost me immediately. Thank you psychology for turning to the dark side.

Is there a chapter 1-20??

I have read this book in a different language and you are correct in 6:55 about the word team, in the language that i read it in it didnt say "tesm" it pretty much said befriend

Thanks you it's very useful as a student of Cheikh Anta Diop university of Dakar Senegal

Excellent work💯and easy to understand. Really appreciate your work😇

11:03

Thank you, Dr. Davis, for putting this beautiful poem up on KZbin for more people to see. I missed two words in the discussion that are woven into my understanding of Stevens. They are "meaninglessness" and "imagination." To me this is the ultimate existential poem (and that could just be me). But, as in so many of Stevens' poems there is the duality of imagined and real (The Man with the Blue Guitar). The snow man is someone without imagination. Without the imagined, it is a barren world. "The nothing that is not there" to me is imagination. "The nothing that is" is the bare meaningless reality of the physical world. We have to create meaning through imagination. Thanks again.

It is not so much philosophical as meditative.You have to have meditated to realise the whole poem because it is about the collapse of the subject/objective boundary that happens when the subject and object relationship disappear you are not separate from the winter.In fact,you are intimate with it.You are it.To do that you have to become(for a moment or as a permanent realisation) no-self,nobody to see things as they are.In Buddhism this is called 'sunyata' or 'emptiness'(wrongly interpreted as'nothingness').To the human mind that tries to 'figure out' the meaning of this, the last stanza seems paradoxical but it isn't.The nothing that you are and the nothing that is are one thing.Then you experience "isness' or 'what is';the nothing that is.And this is to experience wholeness.,oneness,what is..which is liberation.Every artist can relate to this when they become totally absorbed in what the are doing,they experience self-forgetfulness,lose all sense of time and lose all sense of time.In the case of the poem, the observer has go have the:mind of winterter of winter to experience it as it ''is', which is rich and. beautiful.Ig is not despairing or nihilistic

Eek did she say feminism? 😲

Thank you! You are a great lecturer!

Thank you so much for this lecture. I loved it !

Thank you

Thank you, this helped me understand the book I was a little confused when I started.

Thank You Ma'am.