Snow Day
Poems on page 247 of our anthology.
(2) In the Wallace Stevens poems we read for Wednesday–“The Snow Man” and “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”–Stevens seems more successful than either Eliot or Pound in creating a sort of inward reserve that resists the pressures in the post-war world around him. How does Stevens pull off this feat, and is the end result a powerful testament to the powers of the imagination, or cowardly escape into the abstract landscapes of the mind?
In “The Snow Man” Stevens takes a moment to let nature simply be nature. He asks the reader to “behold” nature and “not think of any misery in the sound of the wind” (5, 7-8). He asks the reader not to project himself into the wind because the wind is just that: the wind. Whatever else is the poet. The final stanza further elucidates this further:
“For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (13-15).
The implication of this is a highly religious sentiment. If the listener brings nothing to the wind, he will realize what the wind is and that whatever he is, is not the wind. It is profound in its simple truth, considering that poetry is fond of manipulating everything natural to its human whim. Poetry so often refuses to let the nightingale be a nightingale. Poetry would prefer to make a zoo animal of him. Sometimes, like Freud said, a cigar is just a cigar. Why can’t the wind be wind?
The Palaz of Hoon from Stevens’s poem “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” is a place that resides entirely in the poet’s mind. It is “out of my mind,” says the speaker, that the details of the scene are revealed (7). The speaker claims that “I was the world in which I walked” and in his escapism he claims that “there I found myself more truly and more strange” (10, 12). The work of the imagination is self-discovery.
When comparing his work to Eliot or Pound, the first difference that comes to mind is that Wallace Stevens did not invent a character like Mauberely or Prufrock. He also, as far as I know, never adopted any Antisemitism or Fascist sympathies (Both Eliot and Pound fell victim to the first, Pound to the second).
While the significance of Pound to Eliot and Eliot to Pound is great, I am not sure about the significance of either of them to Stevens. He, living his life in the United States apart from a collaborative poetic life in Europe, could be said to be free from their direct influence.
Wallace Stevens has been called a poet of the mind. Eliot and Pound, then, are more likely poets of the world. They are not free from its influences quite like Stevens is. Stevens sees himself “strange” in his poetry because he knows himself. Others might not be able to see it, as they are not as familiar with his mind (how could they be?).
I would call it escapism, but not cowardly. To express the innermost and make it intelligible to the reader is difficult, even heroic, work. Wallace Stevens coped with a changing world by using his imagination. Eliot, according to Williams Carlos Williams, took Poetry a step backwards with The Waste Land. The same could probably be said for Pound’s Cantos. Wallace Stevens represents freedom of the mind and this freedom is reflected in his free flowing form. I worry what form a mind mixed with Antisemitism and fascist ideology might make.
Happy snow day!
In the Norton Anthology’s headnotes to Wallace Stevens it mentions that “he had little to do with other writers…that he was on a first-name basis with almost no one.” Poets like Stevens and Dickinson intrigue me because they are outside of the writing community yet they end up being successful anyway. Despite what we like to think, a lot of the canon is “networking.” If you were connected to “the great group” somehow then you’ll probably be in the canon. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, considering talented writers tend to seek out and commune with other talented writers. So it makes sense.
But someone like Stevens is outside this group, like you say in your post, and his poetry shows it. His poetry is able to exist without connections to other poets. He feels no obligation to react or respond to or get swept up in the same controversies his contemporaries did. His poetry rests solely in exploratory imagination. That is not to say he cannot be culturally relevant just because he is so inward. Rather, he is culturally relevant in a different way. Though Stevens tangles with the recesses of the mind, he is still extremely aware of the outside.
I agree with you that his inwardness is not escapism. He is actually quite invested in his environment. He places his thoughts onto the cultural landscape while also bringing that landscape into his head. He is very much in tune to the world around him and how much it influences him. Stevens quite simply cannot escape the outside world, nor does he want to. He says in “The Snow Man,” “One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs,” and he closes with an encouragement to listen closely to the snow. The speaker of the poem is stating that someone cannot understand the outside world if you do not know your inside self, and also you cannot know yourself without listening to the outside. In order for Stevens to explore the abyss of his imagination, he is required to also explore his environmental and cultural surroundings.
Your post was well-written, and I enjoyed it very much :]
Great conversation here. I’m interested, Katherine, in your sense that there is a message of–not sure the term to use here–social responsibility in Stevens’s Snowman. I guess this all hinges on the degree to which we want to read the howling winds and frosted boughs as figures for a more peopled reality, or as an evacuation of that reality… more in class I hope!