The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Stevens, Wallace. "The Snow Man." Poetry Foundation Online. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45235/the-snow-man-56d224a6d4e90.

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Wallace Stevens is one of the foremost poetic figures of modernism, a literary movement from the beginning of the twentieth century that stressed breaking with tradition, nonlinearity, and a focus on images over narratives. Stevens is often known as a difficult poet given the frequent complexity of his subject matter. His work showcases an interest in exploring the relationship between creativity and objective reality.

“The Snow Man” describes an unnamed human figure in a bare winter landscape populated only by ice, frost, and trees. Wallace Stevens conceptualizes the figure as both of the landscape while at the same time observing it with an impossible equanimity. The interchangeability between the figure, the foreground, and the background of the scene creates an intriguing dynamic in which the man becomes part of the natural elements, comprised of their same character. Wallace Stevens, in setting this scene in which a human figure is unmoved by the stark and foreboding sights and sounds of nature, imagines a kind of spiritual integration between the human mind and the universe. The human mind is directly referred to in the first line of the poem, which functions somewhat ambiguously as a musing and an imperative: “One must have a mind of winter” (1). This sets in motion the description of a winter that is both concrete, tangible, and unforgiving and the same time interior to human consciousness.