I think Harold Bloom’s discussion of Wallace Stevens’ poem The Snow Man (in The Poems of Our Climate) is more complicated than it needs to be and strangely neglects to consider the theme of snow.
The snow man is “nothing” because he is made of snow — of the impermanent — while the “nothing that is there” is the more permanent things that snow will conceal, and the “nothing that isn’t” is the snow itself — the impermanent, the seasonal, the merely perceived.
To not hear “misery in the wind” means both to not imbue the purely material universe with human sentiment as well as to not find the wintry state miserable.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 
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