Wallace Stevens Meta Poetry Analysis

Twentieth-century American poet Wallace Stevens has been a great challenge for the many critics that studied his work. Stevens is not an easy poet to understand and his poems are complex and tangled. Stevens’ poetry can be referred to as “meta poetry” since it involves an investigation into its own rules, its potential uses, how it works, what it does and what it is capable of. His poems are often aware of their own existence and discuss the idea of poetry as well as the process of writing poetry. In his book Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction: a New Romanticism, Joseph Carroll closely studies Stevens’ poetry and prose in relation to Romanticism. Carroll’s book explains that while Stevens’ “style and manner draw heavily on the style and manner

In the sixth book of The Prelude, Wordsworth and his friend are finally able to see the summit of Mount Blanc. Wordsworth then expresses his great disappointment at the view in front of him as it does not live up to what he imagined it to be. He explains how they “grieved to have a soulless image on the eye/ which had usurped upon a living thought/ that never more could be” (Wordsworth, 456 - 458). In her thesis “Inescapable choice: Wallace Stevens 's new Romanticism and English romantic poetry”, Noriko Tomioka states that “Wordsworth could not press back against the pressure of overwhelming reality exerted by Mont Blanc” (Tomioka, 31). She continues to explain that “the usurpation by reality shows the dominance of reality over the imagination, the weakness of which is revealed against the pressure of reality” (Tomioka, 31). Wordsworth points out the challenge poets face when trying to balance between truth and imagination. The problematic question of truth and imagination is also raised by Stevens as evident in one of his earliest poems “The Snow Man”. In his short and sharp poem “The Snow Man”, Stevens enacts the possibility of viewing the world stripped of all human feelings, thoughts and imagination. He examines the possibility of a neutral view of the world that

The poem suggests that only by leaving the imagination behind, one is able to have “a mind of winter” (Stevens, 1). The poem enacts this suggestion through the shift from descriptive language and imagery in the first two stanzas to plain language in the following stanzas. This descriptive view of winter at the beginning of the poem is the effect of human imagination and the mind’s self-projection onto nature. However, the speaker gradually removes his subjective human experience and is able to reach reality and see the landscape for what it really is; bare land. In “The Snow Man”, Stevens is trying to undo the work of the imagination and enact an opposite process. The visually descriptive language in the first two stanzas changes to mainly aural descriptions in the following stanzas. The poem describes the sound of “the wind”, “of a few leaves”, “of the land” and “of the same bare place” (Stevens, 8 - 10). The shift that starts in the third stanza is not only from seeing to hearing but from the particular to the general. The specific imagery of the crusted boughs and the shagged junipers is contrasted with the expansive and vast descriptions of the wind and of the land. Stevens, through all the previously mentioned shifts, enacts the process of reducing one’s senses, feelings, thoughts and particularity until becoming “nothing” all