Biography of Wallace Stevens, a Classic American Poet
“The Death of a Soldier” is expectedly very down to earth and honest in the way that a fallen soldier’s life can end in the large picture of things not mean a whole lot. The opening stanza, “Life contracts and death is expected, as in a season of autumn. The soldier falls,” goes along in the belief that soldiers are expected to and will give up their lives for whatever they may be fighting for. Stevens compares this thought with the autumn season. This season is unlike any of the others because it is the end of the time that most people enjoy, the warm weather and fully grown trees, etc. Autumn is plant life
dies as all the leaves fall to the ground and the bitterly windy and cold weather is rushed in. The loss of life during war and troublesome times can be compared with the loss of mother nature during the autumn season. Also using a soldiers death as simple in comparison to the falling of leaves shows how expected and it’s so normally thought of.
“He does not become a three-days personage, imposing his separation, calling for pomp.” Stevens points to a fallen soldier has someone who isn’t looking or won’t receive the celebration or fame from society. A soldier isn’t someone who is looking to single himself out from the rest of the army. Stevens writes this to show how simplistic the death of a solider is when compared equally to the season of autumn.
The last two stanzas shows how uneventful a soldiers death becomes. Stevens writes, “Death is absolute and without memorial, as in a season of autumn, when the wind stops…over the heavens, the clouds go, nevertheless, in their direction.” Stevens paints a clear picture letting you think of a windless sky with all the clouds moving in one direction. And like a soldiers death won’t make any large impact, neither does the wind stopping in the middle of autumn when the clouds will continue to move without trouble. Death is absolute just like the changing of seasons and effects of autumn are absolute. Stevens uses a serious subject like a solider being a victim of war and a basically casual subject such as the weather and seasons, mixes them and builds connections.
Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather chose to read “The Death of a Soldier” during the 10th Annual National Poetry Month in April as a way of remembrance of the American soldiers who are currently fighting across the globe. The poem uses imagery to show perhaps, the injustice in the world when a soldiers death is looked upon with no more importance than the changing of the seasons. Stevens, whose life spanned both World Wars had to have been connected deeply with how the fallen soldiers were treated at some point. Be it by the media, public or whether or not they were remembered
correctly, the poem paints a depressing picture of taking soldier’s lives for granted.
The poem, “The Snow Man” is just one long sentence that requires the reader to fulfill a couple of ideas to completely understand the meaning. “One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time to behold the junipers shagged with ice…”. Stevens felt that to understand and to be able to analyze what he was trying to say, you would have to have a “mind of winter” and must have been cold for a long time. A question this raises is, what exactly is a “mind of winter.” This is the first time that Stevens introduces something
factored with psychology. A “mind of winter” can be anything someone can associate with winter. Obviously with a poem titled, “The Snow Man,” the reader will automatically have a mind of winter.
Unlike the previous poem, the main factor of “The Snow Man” isn’t built around imagery. Stevens then introduces the idea of misery in the third stanza, “…Of the January sun; and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves…,” and more specifically the sound of misery. Stevens connects some sort of misery feeling or sound into the winter feeling and everything that comes along with it.
Stevens is saying that to be invisible to the pain that a dead winter brings, you have to hold the characteristics that would help you endure it. An immunity to winter is what will help you, even though one probably doesn’t exist unless you make your home in a heated room for all the length of the season. Stevens ends the poem with the following message, “For the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” He uses repetition at the end using the word ‘nothing’ three times in the final two lines of the poem. He figures that society and the world is a painfully insincere place because he describes the listener of mother nature as not being able to hear or understand pain or misery.
Stevens may be using the proverbial Snow Man title as a figurehead for the environment as a whole which is completely full of misery. In the actual poem, he never mentions by name any kind of snow man. But when someone looks at the title, they automatically get a picture of winter, blizzard type weather, snowy mountains and other things associated with winter. They will automatically feel chilled as they do think back to a memorable winter. So right off the bat, he will have people thinking about coldness and once they read the poem, they will think about whether or not they have the “mind of winter.” And Stevens is saying that there is such a great divide between the public and nature that even if they were looking for something negative in nature, their short-sightedness would prevent them from being able to see it. Especially in today’s world where there is a big problem as far as the environment goes, this poem is as correct now in the 21st century as it was back during Wallace Stevens’ time in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Wallace Stevens once said about style that, “Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.” Stevens’ style was that to turn his words into pictures that made his poetry that much more enjoyable. In a 1994 Art Journal article, Ned Balbo wrote, “Stevens used his poems as a medium for the exploration of ideas but also as repositories for images and language that held strong theoretical, and often personal, associations.” Stevens often used lots of details to create
such a picture with his poetry that the reader could easily think of it and enjoy his work. His personal associations were interesting for a poet because he worked as a reporter, a lawyer and a businessman in an investment banking firm and did not look to poetry as a career. He went to work like any other average person, came home after a long day to kick back and relax. Only, unlike others, he wrote poetry to relax and filled countless number of books with his work. Since his death, he’s largely regarded as one of the most influential poets of the 20th century.
