I have long discerned connections between "The Snow Man" and the work of Robert Frost [pictured left receiving a medal of honor from President John F. Kennedy in 1962], an association that Frost's surname handily suggests. It is incontrovertible that the teaching of Wallace Stevens's great poem "The Snow Man" benefits by concurrent analysis of two of Frost's poems, "Stopping By Woods on a Snow Evening" and "Desert Places."
We associate "the nothing that is" with Stevens; it is the final phrase in "The Snow Man." Here is a line from Frost's long poem "New Hampshire": "Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred." Is the "nothing" here a word that requires the definite article? Consider the double negative. The line paraphrased is "Nothing [with exceptions] is sacred." As "nothing is sacred" is itself a well-worn expression that Frost would not use without a degree of irony, I wonder whether the "Nothing" that opens the line does not denote the absence of everything.
Comments and suggestions from readers are most welcome.-- DL
Frost and Stevens appear to be very different kinds of poets, with Stevens more modernist and philosophically abstract. I don't think Frost would ever say "the nothing." Here's what Frost wrote to Stevens after they met in Key West, Florida in 1935: "If I’m somewhat academic (I’m more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better: it is so we are saved from being literary and deployers of words derived from words." See https://www.kwls.org/key-wests-life-of-letters/post_11/.
Posted by: Greg Zeck | November 12, 2020 at 02:48 PM
If it is not built with hands, then it is built by something non human. Hands are of Man alone. The part for the whole. But it is built nonetheless. Nothing could also be No Thing. Taking out the double negative would give you with exceptions Things built by man are sacred.
God created the heavens and earth out of nothing and without the hands of man, so that too is sacred. Maybe Frost is getting to the point of existence right before the universe was created. That would be the time that only God the sacred existed. There were no things.
Posted by: Maria Leng | November 12, 2020 at 04:01 PM
Thank you for these valuable comments. -- DL
Posted by: David Lehman | November 13, 2020 at 12:04 PM
But could anything be sacred in the time that only God existed? If there were no human beings, nothing could be sacred because there must be people to deem things sacred--that is, pointing man towards God. Once God began to create Nature, the final step, the creation of Adam and Eve was inevitable: through nature man could come to know God and worship Him/Her. Robert Frost saw "work with hands" as a central way to understand Nature, Wallace Stevens was more concerned with knowing that occurs within the mind.
Posted by: Millicent Caliban | November 21, 2020 at 09:55 AM
What a beautiful piece of analysis, Millicent. Thank you.
Posted by: David Lehman | November 21, 2020 at 12:44 PM