Wallace Steven’s poems “The Snow Man” and “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” each present little moments of satisfaction and palpable images for the reader to chew on. What is special about these poems is the historical context they were written in: a post-war western heap of sadness, loss, and disparity. Some may argue that Stevens’ poems, as well as some of the other imagist poetry being produced at the time are mere cowardly escapes from the true pulses that are moving throughout the post-war culture. However, what I’m arguing is that poems like “The Snow Man” and “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” are more than just emotional playthings; they are crucial poetic landmarks in the movement away from the first World War. Specifically in these two poems, the speaker creates two separate universes: the first being the landscape or environment around them and the second is the realm that the first takes the speaker into. To put more simply: the first realm of the poem is in the now–the specific images and moments displayed with the language. And the second realm is what the speaker makes of his surroundings. In “The Snow Man”, the speaker is talking of winter and how there’s the reality of cold, windy, barren landscape. However, what Stevens presents is the idea that with a little imagination, one can transcend themselves far away from the barren world and into something far different. The last stanza of “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” describes this Stevens phenomena perfectly:
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.
What Stevens successfully does through his poetry is offer the option for a different kind of mindset. In the midst of death and loss in post-war civilization, Steven’s shows the beauty in the barren and lets a little light shine for all to see.
I like your sense of these poems being “crucial poetic landmarks” in the post-war world. It’s as though their doubling down on subjective perception re-introduces us to the “self” in an important way–it gives the self back to us, allowing us to see it as the fortifying ground of our perceptions and our relationship with the world. In that sense it is indeed a very grounding poem.