by Robert Burk

Created on: June 17, 2009

It is obvious we are comparing two very different souls, highlighted perhaps by the fact that Wallace Stevens is a poet and Henry David Thoreau writes prose. Stevens came to poetry late in life but blossomed rapidly. Thoreau's writing encompasses 20 volumes.

Stevens was a lawyer most of his life and an executive of a life insurer, before he got into writing. He was educated at Harvard, the same school where Thoreau studied rhetoric, philosophy, classics, and mathematics. Thoreau never attained the financial independence enjoyed by Stevens, his stint at Walden pond was largely undertaken to reduce his material needs to a level that would enable him to write his first book. Up until that time he had enjoyed some success as an essayist,

Yet the two became willful outcasts, condemning society not just in words but by absenting themselves from it. Here the two men part company for Thoreau is justly famous for his short, but idyllic, stay beside Walden Pond in a cabin fashioned by his own hands. Wallace remained a part of respectable society but distanced himself in spirit as can be seen in The Snowman and other poems.

Thoreau was the man of action whose criticism could and did extend to civil disobedience. His convictions were strong enough for him to spell them out in no uncertain terms, even as he lived them at Walden Pond.

Wallace perhaps had it too comfortable and had far too much to lose to cast his fate on the wind. His separation was far more spiritual and subtle even ironic than that enjoyed by Thoreau.

In the last stanza of The Snowman he appears to identify himself with the subject he writes about, standing but unaware of the life that surrounded him. His was a world of the mind cut off from the winter in which he found himself.

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Thoreau, with a different nature was able to grapple with the world. He even spent a night in jail for unpaid taxes and would have spent more time still had his aunt not bailed him out.

Thoreau also engaged civilization at a deeper level in his condemnation of what would be called agro-farming today and the consequent loss of wild species of apples, but he was not an idealist and appreciated the benefits of science and civilization. These possibly could not be appreciated in context by Wallace Stevens for it seemed he never left the comforts of middle class America

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