I was encouraged to read The Snowman by Wallace Stevens at the Royal Academy’s annual Friends’ carol service in St. James’s, Piccadilly.  It should really have been read by Edmund de Waal, who wrote in the text to his exhibition that ‘There is nothing whiter than a white page, nothing quieter than a library…In Wallace Stevens’ poem The Snow Man, the exhortation is to behold “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”‘.   He wanted his exhibition to be called The nothing that is instead of White, the title of his new book.