With “The Snow Man” Wallace Stevens presents a bleak landscape that deliberately evokes forlorn, hopeless feelings. Yet alongside the presentation of such images, Stevens offers a decidedly content, if not tranquil commentary. His opening lines “One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs/Of pine trees crusted with snow;” suggest that winter is only bleak because those not of a “winter mind” assign it those qualities. In this way, Stevens creates a a sense of inward reserve that serves as a stronghold against any external disturbances, for he has resolved to align his mindset, his imagination, with the circumstances of his surroundings, thereby securing an infallible method of negating any adversity. In his last stanza, he offers a linguistic riddle: “For the listener, who listens in the snow,/And, nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Here he seems to suggest the objective ambivalence of reality and the curious tendency of people to project traits onto this objectivity, thereby altering their own reality for good or bad accordingly.
This sentiment is also reflected in “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.” In this poem, Stevens creates a more brightly hued conception of the redeeming powers of the imagination. He presents exquisite imagery, offering up a picture of himself as defined by every excess, every ability of his imagination. He asserts, however, that this glorious way in which he sees himself is indeed only his imagination, for what he “saw or heard or felt came not but from [himself].” Stevens, however, offers non apology for this. Indeed, he almost celebrates the fact that he is able to simultaneously distinguish and merge the worlds of imagination and reality in what he calls “supreme fiction” without any need for justification or explanation. In fact it is only within this limitless imaginary world where Stevens finds either solace or wonder; it is in the Palaz of Hoon, not an insurance office, where Stevens is able to achieve anything real, for there he finds himeself “more truly and more strange.”