Trey Highton

Prof. Seldon
Paper #2 de Man

A Mind of Winter:
Wallace Stevens' The Snow Man
... how miserable, how shadowy and fleeting, how aimless
and arbitrary the human intellect appears in nature.
- Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)

Wallace Stevens' poem The Snow Man is written in the Romantic tradition wherein the poet
finds himself meditating upon a scene or object. Within this convention, the poet usually describes an
object or scene that is holding his attention and then proceeds to reveal his thoughts and revelations that
this thing has inspired. Stevens, however, skips a description of the snow man entirely (in fact the only
reference occurs within the poem's title) and delves immediately into a Nietzschean meditation that
focuses on the epistemological and anthropomorphic ability to know. The poem's meaning is hinged
upon the final paradox of the last line, wherein the reader must grapple between the, Nothing that is
not there and the nothing that is. Everything rests upon Stevens' nothing. This paper intends to
explore Stevens' intentions, whether nihilistic or hopeful, by closely examining the poem in relation to
Nietzschean epistemological philosophy and in the critical deconstructionist tradition of Paul de Man.
The entire poem is composed of only one long sentence broken into five tercets, the reading of
which is impelled by the recurring conjunction and. The poem opens with the impersonal pronoun
One, which serves to embody both the author and the reader, and hide an anonymous, hidden speaker
(the only other pronoun, also impersonal, the listener, occurs in the final stanza) and is followed by
the deontic modal verb must, which immediately implies a prerequisite condition upon entering the
text of the poem - One must have a mind of winter . This mindset is at the core of Stevens

intentions, and although stated in the opening line of the poem, can only be revealed with further
exploration.
The first two stanzas are full of decorative language describing the visual realm of a winter
landscape: pine-trees crusted with snow junipers shagged with ice spruces rough in the
distant glitter (my emphasis). These adjectives, words describing textures and light, are used to
differentiate between located particulars within the landscape; while distant supplies a subjective
point-of-view perspective of the unknown speaker. This descriptive language is a self-projection, an
attempt to control the world by describing it the imposition of human consciousness on the outside
world that Hume refers to in On Nature. This can also be seen in Stevens reference to the, January
sun, in the first line of the third stanza both time and its division into months, years, et al, being a
man-made construct. The simple fact that all the trees in Stevens' landscape are evergreens, unaffected
by the seasons, is an attribute to nature's ability to seemingly stand outside of man's fabricated notion of
time.
The verbs in the first two stanzas are also centered on the realm of the visual. The first, To
regard, is both a mental (thought) and physical (gaze) act, and is derived from the French regarder,
which means 'to watch.' The second, To behold, is a solely physical act, and is the product of the Old
English word bihaldan, bi- meaning 'thoroughly' and haldan meaning 'to hold.' The compounded root
meanings of these verbs, 'to watch' and 'to thoroughly hold,' are perfectly aligned with the notion of the
concept, or Begriff in German, which evolved from greifen, meaning 'to grasp.' Kant asserted in his
Critique of Pure Reason that through our minds we can know nothing of the outside world, or the
substratum, and that empirically, through our senses, all we have access to are appearances. So
language therefore, and all language as de Man asserts in his Allegories of Reading, becomes a figural
grasping at the truth a metaphor of perceived reality. Following this line of reasoning, Nietzsche goes
on to attest that, every word becomes a concept and concepts are but the lingering
residues of metaphors (Nietzsche 27 & 32).

The 'thing in itself' [Kant's Ding an sich] (which would be, precisely,
pure truth without consequences) is utterly unintelligible, even for the
creator of language, and certainly nothing to strive for, for he designates
only the relations of things to human beings and helps himself to the
boldest metaphors. First, to transfer a nerve stimulus into an image
first metaphor! The image again copied in a sound second metaphor!
We think we know something about the things themselves when we
speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers, yet we possess only metaphors
of the things, which in no way correspond to the original essences.
Nietzsche, On Truth and Untruth, 25-27
With these limits of language in mind, the mode of using visually descriptive language that
decorates the first two stanzas comes to a distinct break in the third and fourth stanza. Stevens
abandons the realm of visual phenomena and begins to work with an aural scope. Concurrent with this
stylistic rupture, language, the artifice of man, is replaced by sound, or the language of nature, the
sound of the wind. Describing the sound, of a few leaves, the land, and a bare place with plain
words that do not differentiate (hence the repetition of sound and same), working within a hysteron
proteron, Stevens is syntagmatically moving towards less and less specified notions. This aspect aligns
with his larger syntagmatic function of moving from the particular and located descriptions of the first
two stanzas into the increasingly unspecified and vast descriptions of the third and fourth stanzas,
which will ultimately climax in his reductive extreme in the final stanza which we will explore later.
Stevens invokes an anthropomorphism by implicating, misery in the sound of the wind. This
imposed human emotion on nature is however prefaced with the instruction, not to think, which
when combined with the first line of the poem, One must have a mind of winter, creates what
Beverly Maeder refers to as a, complicated praeteritio ('One must have' x 'not to think') (Maeder
102). The possession of a mind of winter, in conjunction with having been cold a long time,
enables one not to think. The crux of this praeteritio, what Stevens is pointing towards, is an
understanding divorced from human perspective. This, however, is an insurmountable paradox; for as
Nietzsche states, the entire empirical word, that is, the anthropomorphic world (Nietzsche 41).
There can be no understanding outside of our inherent empirical perspective; we only have our senses

with which to grasp the world, no matter how deceptive they may be, and there can be no thought
outside of language we are trapped in what de Man aptly refers to as the prison house of language
(de Man 4). Language, a human construct, is all we have with which to compose even our most
intimate, unrevealed thoughts; it is therefore impossible to think un-anthropomorphically because there
is no outside of language, and all language is anthropomorphic. Even the most stoic of individuals who
has meditatively trained his mind and body to deny his misery, is still unable to approach the world
and his conceptual grasp of the real from any other perspective of that of the human, or the
anthropomorphic. For the time being, let us grant this impracticality in order to finish our examination
of the poem.
As previously mentioned, Stevens' syntagmatic structuring of the poem moves from more
particular descriptions to more vague depictions. For example, the tautology of the third and fourth
stanzas in which the sound of Stevens' natural winter world blurs the distinctions between wind
and land. Beverly Maeder notes that, Stevens has his copula 'is' create a tautological definition
that turns back on itself and conflates land and wind and, metaphorically, earth and air, body and
breath, graphic signs and sound waves (Maeder 106). This blending of the wind and land is
furthered through the heavy repetition of fricatives (th) in the final line, which, in the larger context of
continual sibilants (s) whose occurrences increase as the poem proceeds, creates a sense of the sound
of the wind in the breath of the reader. Not only is this a masterful marriage of form to content, but it
also serves to recreate the way in which the sound of the wind is aurally manifested for the wind, in
and of itself, is noiseless. Only through contact with other objects, a few leaves, the land itself, or
the human ear, does it become audible and perceptible.
The land itself, a metaphor for the metaphysical substratum, the foundational ground upon
which all understanding must rely, becomes a paradox in the fourth stanza. Being both, Full of the
same wind / That is blowing in the same bare place, (my emphasis) the land, being both full and
barren, foreshadows the nothing that haunts the poems conclusion. A nothing, which Michael

Davidson explains, whose surrounding double negatives literally produce a 'nothing' that is both full
and empty at the same time (Gery).
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Stevens' syntax in the final stanza forces multiple meditative readings and many questions to be asked
before one is able to broach any of his possible intended meanings. For instance, if the addressed is
nothing himself, then to whom is the poem addressing? How can a perspectiveless nothing
behold anything? And further, how can a text exist without a reader?
Behold now appears for a second time within the poem. The first time as a subjunctive in the
second stanza, and this final occurrence as the indicative beholds, denoting that this action is now
taking place. The connotations implicit with this verb insinuate the witnessing of something
remarkable, impressive, or even miraculous in the Biblical sense an epiphany. What the reader here
beholds, if he is capable, is not only the essence of the poem, but the essence of truth, of knowable
reality. The assertion that the listener is now nothing himself, suggests that a mind of winter has
been achieved. As we wrestled with previously, this is only possible wherein understanding and
perception become severed from perspective. B.J. Leggett summarizes concisely:
The form this contradiction takes in The Snow Man is that its desired
world of a perspectiveless beholding is given as the perspectival world
that is to be surrendered. Or, to state the contradiction more sharply, it is
the very world the man in the snow is asked to obliterate that, he is
informed, he will then regard once it has been erased . . . The argument of
the poem may thus be reduced to this form: in order to realize x,
surrender the faculties by which x is realized.
B.J. Leggett, Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext, 189 & 193

This dehumanizing surrender of perspective, if at all possible, and which Nietzsche himself
denies (That drive to the formation of metaphor [anthropomorphic perspective], that fundamental
drive of man that cannot be written off even for a moment, since one would thereby be writing off man
himself ), can perhaps only be explained in the context of a similar paradox from another of
Stevens' poems, The Plain Sense of Things: Yet the absence of imagination had / Itself to be
imagined (Nietzsche 42). Following this epistemological modality, only through perspective can
perspective ostensibly be forfeited a purification of perspective that would wring it of its own
humanity ridding it of idea, emotion, connotation, and all other context. The apparent unreality of
this proposal is countered by Stevens' notion that, Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which
our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers (Stevens
174-75).
This proposed pure perspective is the only means through which one can grasp the nothing,
the Kantian, nonlinguistic noumenal, within the chiasmus of the poem's final line. This refined
objectivity allows one to see through the Nothing that is not there by decreating all the human
contextual projections that are inherent in the reading of any text to realize and behold, a priori,
the nothing that is. The last word is, the only being in the poem, is a final positive assertion that
refutes possible nihilistic readings, which is supported by Kant's belief, in The Critique of Pure Reason,
that there must at least be the possibility of a real world due to our sensual perception of it. Is is
among our most familiar language objects or sites yet it becomes slightly exotic here and suggestive
not only of worlds that are concealed or revealed by language, but also of the place not outside of
language but made by it (Maeder 104).
Within the context of the poem, Stevens' mind of winter allows one access to knowledge of
the noumenal, which is otherwise unattainable through traditional empirical sensations and endeavors;
however, this dehumanized, pure perspective disables the very notion of a competent reader. Without
past referential experiences and cultural capital, the language one would be confronted with in the act

of reading would be utterly meaningless, because the context that connects the sign to the signified
would have been wiped away.
If all our interpretations were erased, what remained would be the text
itself, except of course the metaphor falls apart at this point, since the
assumption of the poem is that the text would be blank if its
interpretations were erased, and a blank text is a form of the contradiction
(to posit nothing as something) that haunts all strict formulations of
perspectivism.
Leggett, Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext, 194
Even after numerous close readings, Stevens' The Snow Man remains an enigmatic poem that
resists definition. The poem toys with the paradoxes inherent in perspectivist texts; the ability to know
what we know which is intrinsic in the limitations of linguistics; and is thoroughly de Man-ian in that
it is an allegory of its own unreadability. Stevens' employs the realms of the visual and aural in his
deftly woven tropes, and ends by positing that only through the imaginary, which he has hierarchically
placed above the empirical, do we as human readers (of the world as a text) have a chance to grasp the
noumenal and know the Ding an sich.
Only through forgetfulness can man ever come to imagine that he
possesses truth to that degree.
Nietzsche, On Truth and Untruth, 24 (my emphasis)

WORKS CITED
de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979.
Gery, John. Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.
Leggett, B.J. Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Untruth. Trans. Taylor Carman. New York: HarperCollins
Publishers, 2010.
Maeder, Beverly. Wallace Stevens' Experimental Language: The Lion in the Lute. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1999.
Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Random
House Inc., 1942.