Wallace Stevens is known for his philosophical meditations on the dual nature of existence through his poetry. According to Stevens, poetry should be concerned neither with the body nor with the mind, but rather "with an interdependence of imagination and reality on an equal footing." It is rather difficult to connect the two concepts because they are located on completely opposite poles of the human psyche. The affiliation between imagination and reality is what Stevens explores and attempts to define and explain: "Stevens's poetry is both surreal (philosophical understanding for the lost) and real (the practical conclusion that Stevens can be as lost as everyone else” (Zarzicki 12) Through the use of natural imagery and contemplative language in his two poems, “The Poems of Our Climate” and “The Snowman,” the complex and convoluted dualism of human existence becomes understandable. Say no to plagiarism. -essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"?Get the original essayThe complex duality of the physical and the metaphysical is described in " The Poems of Our Climate' In the first stanza, Stevens describes the physical appearance of the world scene through the use of pure and serene words, such as "bright", "clear", "snowy", "white". , “newly fallen”, “cold” and “porcelain”. Through this use of diction, Stevens. illustrates a world beautifully silent and untouched due to its dissociation from human existence. However, this atmosphere is not ideal for him because complete detachment is not desirable: “Pink and white carnations, we want much more than that” (6-7), “Here the object – a bowl of carnations pinks and whites – promises idealization, and pretty much fulfills it, only to cause dissatisfaction” (Smith 47). There is both an attraction and a repulsion to a world that has been untouched by humans. Stevens' choice of diction gives the scene beauty and purity, but also apathy and disgust, which illustrates the conflicting and confusing relationship between imagination and reality. In the second stanza, Stevens shows the impossibility of reality without imagination: "in a world of white, a world of clear water and shiny edges, one would want even more, one would need more, more than a world of white and snow. perfumes” (14-17). Although human imagination alone can create deformities and complications, it is still considered unpleasant and unlivable. The expression “scents of snow” is contradictory because snow contains no odor and the “world of white” is empty and has nothing to show off. There is no pleasure for the human senses in this world, so it is neither satisfying nor true. Stevens further explains the disgust of a pure world in the final stanza when he states: "There would always remain the mind that never rests, so that one would want to escape...the imperfect is our paradise » (18-21). Human existence requires a constant fluctuation between imagination and reality to function. Neither sector can be completely grasped or understood, they just both need to be present in one form or another. Stevens also states, “The imperfect is so warm within us” (24). The presence of the word "warm" directly opposes the cold imagery of winter in the first two stanzas of the poem, which further illustrates the paradox of life: "Given our insatiable desire, the nature of our mind which never rests and our inability to If you say the right words, we have only one option: consider the imperfect as “our paradise”. And once we have considered the imperfect as our paradise, itsbitterness becomes more and more convincing. “The imperfect is so burning in us” that it becomes in itself a kind of insatiable desire. To be wrong, Stevens proposes, is what it means to have a human mind. And the work of the mind brings its own pleasure” (Skorczewski 103). He concludes the poem by stating that the imperfect "lies in imperfect words and stubborn sounds" (25). Words arise from the imagination, but used to describe aspects of reality. Although these words are “imperfect,” meaning they cannot completely unify imagination and reality, they are nonetheless crucial to functional human existence; therefore, reality and imagination must be used simultaneously to enable a desirable life. While “The Poems of Our Climate” promotes the interweaving of imagination and reality, “The Snowman” suggests a complete detachment of the imagination and the active mind. As seen previously in “Poems from Our Climate,” Stevens uses natural imagery in “The Snow Man” to describe a pure and serene winter environment: “pines covered in snow… junipers felled by ice… rough spruce trees in the distant glitter.” (1-4). He insists that one must "have a winter spirit", a spirit free from all subjectivity and all sensory warmth: "it accepts and appreciates this bare scene, and there is nothing special in the place of his experience, nor in himself to experience this scene. there” (Cook 48). The mind is active and always adding, it is what influences human perception: "winter words for a winter material, as elegant as any decoration, imply our feelings as directly as the image can doing…it involves our minds” (Tindall 23). In order to establish a winter mind, one must banish the imaginative mind and focus only on the concrete, emotionless aspects of the physical world. The imagery is greatly simplified and toned down in the second half of the poem as the sensory richness deteriorates and the mind becomes colder: "In the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the earth, full of the same wind that blows in the same bare place” (9-12). Stevens's description of the scene in the poem is stark and restrained, which is necessary for establishing a winter spirit. The last stanza turns the poem as a whole upside down. Stevens introduces “the nothing,” a revelation of the nothingness that winter evokes. In this stanza, “there are two kinds of nothingness: “the nothingness that is” and “nothing,” which is the absence of something. The greatest lack is the latter: the absence of imagination in the man who “sees nothing that is not there”” (Oster 159). When one stops creating the world one perceives, the world loses its meaning, which Stevens depicts structurally as the poem ends once the creative principle of the speaker's imagination has disappeared. By placing the word "the" before "nothing" and "nothingness", the concept becomes conceptualized, and affirms while limiting the process of decreation: "He (the speaker) has become the snowman, and he knows winter with a the spirit of winter, knows it in its strictest reality, stripped of all imagination and all human feeling. But at that moment, when he sees the winter scene reduced to an absolute fact, as the object not of the mind, but of the perfect perceptive eye which sees "nothing that is not there" , then the scene became “the nothing that is”. » (Package 68). Through this poignant ideology, Stevens untangles the paradoxical mess of human existence, allowing the reader to better understand the dualism of perception. Stevens's language in "The Snow Man" is demanding as the first words of the poem, "One.