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Galway Kinnell: Adamic Poet and Deep Imagist. Leo Luke Marcello Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College

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Galway Kinnell: Adamic Poet and Deep Imagist. Leo Luke Marcello Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1976 Galway Kinnell: Adamic Poet and Deep Imagist. Leo Luke Marcello Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Marcello, Leo Luke, "Galway Kinnell: Adamic Poet and Deep Imagist." (1976). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 2930. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/2930 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 76-25,273 MARCELLO, Leo Luke, 1945- GALWAY KINNELL; ADAMIC POET AND DEEP IMAGIST. The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Ph.D., 1976 Literature, modern XOrOX UniVGrSity Microfilms,Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 0 1976 LEO LUKE MARCELLO ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. GALWAY KINNELL: ADAMIC POET AND DEEP IMAGIST A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Leo Luke Marcello B.A., Tulane University, 1967 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1970 May, 1976 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT............................................. iii Chapter I. INTRODUCTION ................................ 1 II. FIRST POEMS.................................. 21 III. TRANSITION: MYTHIC TO ADAMIC PO E T ............ 41 IV. THE DEEP I M A G E .............................. 73 V. THE ADAMIC MODE AND THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES................................ 100 VI. BLACK LIGHT.................................. 144 VII. CONCLUSION.................................. 170 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................ 186 VITA ................................................. 190 IX Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT Galway Kinnell experimented with a number of poetic stances before he developed the methods which he success­ fully employs in The Bock of Nightmares (1971). Developing from the American transcendental tradition, he yearns for a spiritual transcendence.. His concept of the "moment of illumination" is derivative of Emerson and Thoreau; however, his basic assumptions about nature separate him from this tradition. First Poans 1946-1954 does not demonstrate this difference. Instead, it reflects Kinnell's experiments with conventional poetic devices. As Kinnell began to become dissatisfied with these devices, he began to experiment with the mythic mode. What a Kingdcm It Was (1960) demonstrates Kinnell's attempt to use the Christian tradition as a source of material. Concluding this collection, the long poem "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World" represents the culmination of this experiment. Kinnell's development from a mythic to Adamic poet can be demonstrated in the transitions which occur in What a Kingdom It Was (1960), Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964), and Body Rags (1968). At the same time, Kinnell was also experimenting with deep imagist technique. By the time he had written The Book of Nightmares, he had become an iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Adamic poet and a deep imagist. Kinnell tried various means of transcendence. First, he experimented with the Christian tradition. When he felt that he had exhausted the possibilities of such a tradition in his poetry, he turned to the idea of bonds: men-women, men-men, men-beasts. Ultimately, he was disillusioned with these possibilities. Bonds with the supernatural seeified impossible, and bonds with living creatures seemed to be doomed by their limitations. The only remaining possibility for transcendence was in the concept of a self-redeeming persona. The persona of The Book of Nightmares is such a character. He begins and ends his journey on the same site, but in the course of the poem he manages to define his own path. He saves himself from the world of nightmares. In the novel Black Light (1966), Kinnell had experimented with a similar journey motif. Jamshid, the protagonist, is a precursor of the persona of The Book of Nightmares. Because Jamshid fails to understand the power of his own perceptions, he fails to save himself. Kinnell's Adamic persona, on the other hand, comes to the realization that transcendence through his own consciousness is the best way to accept the fact of death. XV Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. INTRODUCTION Roy Harvey Pearce in The Continuity of American Poetry has said. In one sense . the history of American poetry is the history of an impulse toward antinomianism. Or, from a related point of view: That history is the record of a gradual but nonetheless revolu­ tionary shift in the meaning of "invention": from "coming upon" something made and ordered by God, to "making" and "ordering"— transforming— something, anything, into that which manifests above all man's power to make and to order. The antinomian drive to accept only one's own testimony as to the worth and authority of the powers-that-be became the "Romantic" drive to testify that one can really know only one's own power, and yet that an element of such knowledge is the realization that all other men have this power too.l The antinomian impulse became an organizing principle in American life. Although the early colonists had sought to expunge it, it became, as Pearce says, a source of "meaning," manifesting itself cohesively in the idea of "community" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Men desired com­ munity because, as their own authorities, they felt alone. In 1634 Mrs. Anne Hutchinson declared that the Elect did not need to prove their election. They were already defined by their conscience and were therefore not subject to the law. The Puritan community quickly realized the latent ^Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 41. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 dangers in such a view. If a man were the sole custodian of his testimony, what would become of the institutions that guided and contained him? The antinomian controversy pro­ jected a view that was larger than the Puritan view of man as a weak, despicable creature. If a man were his own authority, he was then free from other men. The Puritan fathers shrewedly cast Mrs. Hutchinson from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Yet the urge to define oneself did not disappear. Pearce calls the poetic mode generated by such an impulse the Adamic mode. The Adamic poet yearns for com­ munity because he sees himself as the center of his world; that is, he sees himself as being alone. "Meaning" emanates from him. Every man is the center of his own circle. Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens
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