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Identify the elements of Modernism in "The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens.
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet and critic, who helped develop the Romantic movement in England. His poems are often divided into two parts: one that contains nature imagery and philosophical ideas about the imagination and how we perceive reality, and another part that focuses on a more traditional narrative story line. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is an example of this division.
Wallace Stevens is known for his technically and thematically complex poems, in which he experiments with abstraction, language, the play of "words and sounds," and the interaction between objective reality and the imagination. While the poets that are grouped under the label of "Modernism" have varying styles and approaches in their writing, there are several unifying concerns that connect those poets to other writers and artists working around that time, pushing back against the art of the past and the confusion of the present in order to "make it new" (as another modernist poet Ezra Pound famously declared).
In Wallace Stevens' poem "The Snow Man," the poet demonstrates several key elements of the modernist poetic style.
Ungrounded/Detached Speaker: In contrast to the more defined sense of self/speaker in Victorian poetry, modernist poems often lack that grounded "I" in favor of a fragmented or disconnected speaker. In "The Snow...
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Man," Stevens uses the detached "one" as the subject, and as the poem progresses through its clauses (separated by semi-colons, but apparently part of the one continuous statement), we lose a sense of that subject in favor of theimagery of the landscape. In this way, the poem's form (the way it is written) is used to express some of the ideas of the poem: nature's immensity and immense barrenness, the paradox of life/death or something/nothing being in such close contact (or perhaps one and the same).
Language as Riddle, or as Meaning: Another frequent element of modernist poetry is the use of language in complex ways, to both obstruct and tease out meaning, and to serve as meaning itself, through sound and form. From a purely grammatical standpoint, "The Snow Man" doesn't read very clearly—keeping track of the subject/objects and where we are in the sentence of the poem isn't very easy. From a language standpoint, the sounds of the words reflect to some extent what is being discussed. For example, in the first two stanzas, Stevens uses more hard consonants: "frost," "pine-trees crusted," "junipers," "spruces," "distant glitter," which contribute to the imagery of ice and snow as hard, brittle, pointy, crunchy. Then, in the next three stanzas, where Stevens switches to discussing the wind, he uses softer consonants and sibilants, round vowels, and repetition: "misery in the sound of the wind," "sound of a few leaves," "sound of the land," "blowing in the same bare place," "listener, who listens in the snow," "beholds."
Desolate/Ambiguous World: Although many modernist poets engaged with the sociopolitical climate of the time (first half of the 1900s) in their work, Stevens was not as likely to comment on those issues, at least directly. While other modernist poets used the idea of a desolate/ambiguous world to reflect the economic depression and international conflicts of the time, Stevens seemed to engage with the same themes for more philosophical reasons. His poetry often explores concepts of nature, change, life/death not as symbols or allusions, but as realities in themselves. "The Snow Man," with its stark imagery of winter and its bleak final lines: "And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is," we get a sense of Stevens' understanding of the natural world, its miniature reflection inside the human mind, and the interplay between reality and our understanding of it.
For more info on Wallace Stevens, and modernist poetry, see the links below!
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