Mini-Lecture on Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man"

[@cafepoem189]

Thank you for your lecture.🙏

[@KK-mn3fr]

Thank you Dr. Davis. This was very helpful and informative!

[@LauraKSDavis]

Glad you enjoyed it and found it helpful.

[@shakesrear7850]

Thank you

[@seamore7833]

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"

[@greggreenway5618]

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.

[@garymelnyk7910]

That’s superb. Cannot fully explain the poem as “it’s a heresy to paraphrase”, but it’s very helpful!

[@seamore7833]

Agree, mostly. Though instead of saying the snow man is someone without imagination, I'd say everyone experiences winter and has moments as the snow man, just as we all have moments in the sun. It is not a barren, but as it is. There is nothing negative about reality as it is - it simply is without perception or judgment. Winter is when we most feel one with reality, a losing of oneself, which becomes unbearable - a full loss of self is a death of the self - but we gain, too. We also gain in the loss, a sloughing off of outside conceptions, clearing the decks, too. This gives space to be filled with a yearning to return, when suppressions are relaxed to imagine anew, the return of the "vital I". "Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, / And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. / I was myself the compass of that sea: / I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself; / And there I found myself more truly and more strange."

[@GreatGastby-sf4go]

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.

[@Davidiona]

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

[@PatrickKordoulis]

Appreciate your work! Thank you!

[@henryzhang1349]

Thank you! You are a great lecturer!

[@bredamaune2028]

A very thought provoking and interesting video. Many thanks.

[@RafaelSaxon]

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?

[@nardeenkhalaily3794]

Thank You

[@LauraKSDavis]

You're welcome!

[@harmonium8198]

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."

[@chrisstark8040]

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

[@chrisstark8040]

Forgive me....I messed up the end because I don't see well and it's late.But you are right to say that nothing is something:it's pure universal consciousness.