"The Snow Man"

Poem Review # 116246

English > Analysis
Literature > Poetry

"The Snow Man"

A review of the poem "The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens.

1,038 words () | 0 sources | 2009 United States

Paper Summary:

This paper analyzes Wallace Stevens' poem, "The Snow Man", and argues that there is no evidence of deconstructionism in the poem. Instead, what is evident in the poem is Stevens' idea of the poet as maker and the ontological nature of the human imagination. Through an analysis of the stanzas in the poem, the paper looks at how the poem describes the ultimate triumph of the poet as creator.

From the Paper:

"The snow man in Stevens' poem, then, is man's attempt to permeate the reality of the world with his own internal reality. Stevens wrote later of this process: "Imagination has no source except in reality, and ceases to have any value when it departs from reality" (Stevens 246). In this manner, then, man must become a snow man "[And] have been cold a long time / To behold the junipers shagged with ice, / The spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun" (Stevens 247). In other words, the poet must become an ineradicable part of the world around him in order to comprehend its mystery."