Writing ‘that animal darkness’: Galway Kinnell, Gary Snyder, James Merrill Johanna Hoorenman A Thesis submitted to the School of English at the University of Dublin, Trinity College, in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2010 DECLARATION This Thesis is entirely my own work and has not been submitted as an exercise for a degree at this or any other University. I agree that the Library may lend or copy this Thesis upon request, subject to normal conditions of acknowledgement. ​​​​​​​​​______________________ Johanna Hoorenman ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank first and foremost my supervisor Dr. Philip Coleman for his constructive and insightful engagement with this thesis. His generous support and encouragement have made this project a positive and memorable experience and I have benefited greatly from his dedication, his expertise and his advice. I wish to gratefully acknowledge the generous financial assistance throughout the writing of this thesis of The Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, Dr. Hendrik Muller's Vaderlandsch Fonds, The Fundatie van de Vrijvrouwe van Renswoude te ’s-Gravenhage, The Trinity Long Room Hub and The Graduate Studies Student Assistance Fund of Trinity College, Dublin. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the School of English, in particular the current Head of School, Dr. Darryl Jones as well as the previous Heads of School Prof. Stephen Matterson and Prof. Nicky Grene and current Head of Discipline Dr. Eve Patten. Thanks also to the administrative staff, Brenda Brooks, Elaine Maddock, Orla McCarthy and Diane Sadler, and the staff of the Trinity College Library, Dublin, in particular the staff of the Interlibrary Loans Department. Thank you to Professor Leo Hoek of the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, who not only offered comments and suggestions for several chapters of the thesis but graciously gave me access to his own research on the ethical aspects of the literary representation of human- animal relationships. A profound thank you also to Dr. Diederik Oostdijk of the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, for his support, encouragement and example at the conception of this project. For their friendship, collegiality and manifold assistance throughout the past three years I would like to thank Jane Carroll, Trish Ferguson, Ann Hoag, Maria Johnston, Jenny McDonnell, Leigh Redemer and Jim Shanahan. You have made me feel increasingly at home in Ireland, in Trinity College and in the Foster Place office and I feel very fortunate to have found such warm, generous and knowledgeable friends in Dublin. Thanks also to my brothers Eduard, Chris and Jaap Hoorenman for their support and good humour throughout this process. To Joost van der Kwaak, for sharing this journey with me and brightening the process at every step with his kindness and humour, a heartfelt thank you. Finally, thank you to my parents, Ed and Joke Hoorenman, for their confidence and affection, and their infinite generosity. This thesis would not have been possible without them. SUMMARY As humanity’s most evident other, at once deeply similar to and fundamentally different from the human, the animal is a valuable poetical trope. This thesis examines the representation and function of animals and animality in the writings of three key late twentieth-century American poets: Galway Kinnell, Gary Snyder and James Merrill. In Chapter One I outline the historical context of the representation of animals in forms of cultural expression and the importance of animals for symbolic activity, as evidenced by the abundant prehistoric depictions of animals in underground caves and the use of animal species as totems among primitive peoples. I also provide an overview of the widely different conceptualisations of animals within world religion and the western philosophical tradition, and delineate the historical context of human-animal relations in American history. Finally, I present a brief introduction to the representation of animals in American literature as an American literary context for the discussion of Kinnell, Snyder and Merrill. ​In Chapter Two I discuss Galway Kinnell’s use of animal subjects and images in the context of four main themes that surface in his animal poems. I demonstrate how Kinnell’s perspective on animals and animality is connected to his perspective on nature as an organic cycle of life in which life, death and rebirth are fundamentally interconnected, through discussions and close readings of among other poems, “Avenue C,” “The Quick and the Dead,” “To Christ Our Lord” and “Ode and Elegy.” I also examine Kinnell’s depictions of death and transformation in “The Bear,” “The Porcupine,” and “The Hen Flower.” Moreover, I show how Kinnell engages with birds as images of transience and transcendence in the poems “Why Regret” and “Frog Pond,” “Mount Fuji at Daybreak,” “The Geese,” and “The Gray Heron.” The chapter concludes with a discussion of the notions of kinship and otherness that are crucial to Kinnell’s animal poetry through a discussion of “Saint Francis and the Sow” and “When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone.” The interplay between these two notions is the primary basis of all of Kinnell’s animal poems, in which he searches for a balance between curiosity and a desire to understand the otherness of different species, and a deep-seated sense of kinship with the creatures that share the experiences of life and mortality with humans. ​Chapter Three focuses on animals in the poems of Gary Snyder. The first section of the chapter traces Snyder’s stylistic engagement with Pound’s imagism and its origins in Asian languages and literatures, which provide him with poetic techniques that allow him to suggest or imagine the unknowable essence of animals. It also discusses Snyder’s engagement with the shamanistic origins of poetry, the oral and performative elements of Native American literature and narrative plots and characters from Native American and world mythology. The chapter subsequently looks at Snyder’s poetic exploration of human-animal relationships through a close reading of his poems on hunting, focusing on “this poem is for deer, “this poem is for birds,” “Hunting 4,” and “Hunting 13” as well as “The Hudsonian Curlew,” and “Long Hair.” The chapter concludes with an exploration of mythological narrative plots and characters involving animals in Snyder’s poems. Through readings of “The Feathered Robe,” “A Berry Feast,” “The Way West, Underground,” “this poem is for bear,” “The Bear Mother,” and “Right on the Trail,” I explore Snyder’s poetic retellings of the mythological animal marriage plot, in the forms of the Swan Maiden and Bear Wife myth. I also look at the ways in which Snyder uses the trickster animal figure of Coyote in “A Berry Feast” and “The Call of the Wild,” and the ways in which Snyder employs these to present to his readers a universe of real and mythological animals and humans in which they can communicate freely and intimately. ​The final chapter, on the animal poems of James Merrill, looks at the particularly metaphorical approach that Merrill takes to his poetic representations of animals. In the first section I outline the influence of Merrill’s general approach to poetry on his representations of the physical, external world. The second section discusses in detail Merrill’s bird poems “The Parrot,” “The Pelican,” and “The Peacock,” as well as “Transfigured Bird” and “Periwinkles,” and the poet’s complex of metaphorical connections revolving around the animals that feature in the poems. The second section looks at three poems in which Merrill depicts a moment of intense but undefined emotion invoked by an animal subject, “The Octopus,” “The Locusts,” and “The Black Swan,” and I show how in these poems, Merrill employs the sublime as a metaphor for the unknown element of animality, to gesture towards the presence of real, physical animals behind his poems and to acknowledge their unavoidable absence within the poems. To my father and mother, Ed and Joke Hoorenman, with love and gratitude CONTENTS Declaration i Acknowledgements ii Summary iii Introduction 1 Chapter One Representing Animals 18 Chapter Two Humanity, Mortality and Animality in the Poetry of Galway Kinnell 76 Chapter Three Imagism, Hunting and Mythology in the Animal Poetry of Gary Snyder 137 Chapter Four James Merrill and the Animal Sublime 194 Conclusion 252 Bibliography 258 Introduction​ Nothing, as a matter of fact, is more closed to us than this animal life from which we are descended. […] the correct way to speak of it can overtly only be poetic, in that poetry describes nothing that does not slip toward the unknowable. […] The animal opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me. In a sense, I know this depth: it is my own. It is also that which is farthest removed from me, that which deserves the name depth, which means precisely that which is unfathomable to me. But this too is poetry… — George Bataille (1897–1962) In his Theory of Religion, Bataille states that animal life is intrinsically closed off from human understanding as it lacks precisely that which is essential to understand it: consciousness. For Bataille, the animal is “in the world like water in water,” by which he seems to indicate an existence in a state of timeless continuity, a world of immanence and immediacy. He holds that since any attempt to imagine animal life, or anything else without consciousness, involves an act of consciousness (namely, consciousness of the notions of we and imagining), we can never truly imagine or understand the animal through science. Only when making a “poetic leap,” when turning oneself over to “the sticky temptation of poetry,” can one look at the animal as not simply a thing, and begin to “[extend a] glimmer into that animal darkness.” However, what can be described as animal poetry is not necessarily always poetry about animals.