On Poetic Sovereignty and Ontological Authenticity: Wallace Stevens’s "The Snow Man"

Amri, Melissa; Benmezal, Farid

الباحث
Volume 17, Numéro 1, Pages 199-211
2025-03-31

On Poetic Sovereignty And Ontological Authenticity: Wallace Stevens’s "the Snow Man"

Authors : Amri Melissa . Benmezal Farid .

Abstract

This paper peruses upon Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” published as part of the Harmonium (1923) collection, as a Neomodernist poem representative of Stevens’s striving for poetic agency and an allegory of the ontological quest to reconcile with an existence discovered to be hollow in light of thorough gnoseological inquiries. Drawing exclusively from Martin Heidegger’s metaphysics in Being and Time (1927), this paper propounds the idea that having a “mind a winter,” an imperative for survival in the poem, is a Heideggerian quest for authenticity and an attempt to disentangle from the throes of Das Man made manifest by the influence of Romanticism and the encroachment of Paleomodernism. “A mind of winter,” in addition, is the endurance of angst in the face of an uncanny condition bereft of divine presence and worldly comprehension. Ultimately, this paper stresses the poem’s mastery in blending what seems to be the poet’s personal journey with themes that brush with the universal and touch upon the primordial question of what it means to Be.