Is Logic Poetic?

On "The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens

If you have a mind to read further, I will try to persuade you that logic is—or can be—poetic.

And I will try to show this through a contoured, formalistic reading of Wallace Stevens’s poem, “The Snow Man.” To do this I’m going to break up his poem by logical unit, rather than by stanza (the aesthetics of the poem and its meaning(s) I save for another post.)

The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens

A. One must have a mind of winter

B. To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

C. And have been cold a long time

D. To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun;

E. and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves,

F. Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Stevens’s poem says that to experience Q, one must have a mental state, P.

The mental state is “a mind of winter” and the environmental condition for this mental state is to “have been cold a long time.”

If one has been cold a long time, and has a mind of winter, then one will not not experience misery in the sound of the wind, but something else. We aren’t told what this something else is, outright.

The narrator, by offering us this possibility, implies that he does experience misery in the wind and that he does not have a mind of winter. But he knows enough to know that a mind of winter would lead to such an experience—which is somewhat paradoxical, and raises the problem of “other minds”—how do we know what others experience when their mental states are different from our own?

The listener/narrator—who does not have a mind of winter—beholds himself as Nothing and beholds two variants of Nothingness—the “Nothing that is” (logical negation) and “the Nothing that is not” (original nothingness as the source of both creation/affirmation and negation). The listener/narrator doesn’t have a Mind of winter, but comes close to having one. Alternatively, the narrator and the listener are two separate people. The listener has a mind of winter and so experiences his own Nothingness, but the narrator doesn’t and so can’t access that experience directly, but can only write a poem about it.

Thus the poem is loopy and unexpected—it starts by saying what one would need to have an experience, but only to suggest that one doesn’t have the experience and doesn’t have what it takes to have it.

This brings us to the ambiguity of the poem’s title, “The Snow Man,” which can refer to an inhuman block of snow shaped in the primitive form of human, or else to a man experiencing himself in the midst of a snow storm, or both.

Perhaps it’s about a person’s contemplation of himself by juxtaposing himself with a snowman he has built. Or perhaps, more mystically, it is the poem of someone writing from their window imagining what a snowman would feel if the snowman were sentient.

The possibilities are manifold—and this is one reason why the poem transfixes us. But note that at the core of the poem’s depth is a logical puzzle, a sequence of if P, then Q, if not P, then not Q, possibilities.

What makes the poem great is, in part, the bizarreness of the ends to which it exploits logical syllogism. Perhaps the conclusion of the poem gestures at the real topic of the poem—not snow, perception, or experience, but Nothingness—and the strange ends to which the concept of 0 can be put. As Heidegger, Nishida, and many a mystic argue, Nothingness is not just a logical category, but an existential one. Negation is only possible on the basis of some aboriginal emptiness. And on that note, good morning!

---

What is Called Thinking? is a practice of asking a daily question on the belief that self-reflection brings awe, joy, and enrichment to one’s life. Consider becoming a subscriber to support this project and access subscriber-only content.

You can read my weekly Torah commentary here.