Masthead Logo The Iowa Review Volume 1 Article 25 Issue 1 Winter 1970 A Reading of Galway Kinnell Ralph J. Mills Jr. Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Mills, Ralph J. Jr.. "A Reading of Galway Kinnell." The Iowa Review 1.1 (1970): 66-86. Web. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.1024 This Contents is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in The oI wa Review by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Reading of Galway Kinnell Ralph J.Mills, Jr. "The little light existing in the mystery that surrounds us comes from ourselves: it a never is false light. The mystery has shown its own." Jules Renard ". .le Rien est la v?rit?" qui Mallarm? "All are one to the earth ..." things thing Kenneth Patchen Galway Kinnell's first collection, What a Kingdom ItWas (1960), can be viewed in now as one of those volumes decisive in the mood retrospect signalling changes and character of American as it from the poetry departed witty, pseudo-mythic written to critical of the 1950's to arrive at the more verse, apparently prescription, authentic, liberated work of the 1960's.1 Our recent poetry shows how closely and vulnerably aware of the palpable life of contemporary society poets have become, for, increasingly during the past decade or so, they have opened themselves as to the violence-ridden ethos of the persons complex, frequently incongruous, age an a in effort to ground the poetic imagination in shared, perceptive reality. This a kind of openness?a sensitive receptivity in which the poet, to borrow phrase of can Heidegger's about H?lderlin, "is exposed to the divine lightnings" that easily on nerves exact their toll and emotional balance?extends, in many instances, be yond matters of social and political experience to naked metaphysical confronta tion: with the universe, the identity of the self, the possibilities of an absent or 1 of but visible at These changes were, course, gradual widely varying points of the on. American literary map from the mid-1950's Roethke, Patchen, Kunitz, Eberhart, W. C. Williams, Weldon Kees, and others can be taken as forerunners. 66 University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Iowa Review ® www.jstor.org or the of a In such present God, prospect vast, overwhelming nothingness. poets as Theodore Roethke, Kenneth Patchen, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, James for Wright, Anne Sexton, James Dickey, W. S. Merwin, and the late Sylvia Plath, vision example, with all differences aside, the pursuit of personal often leads toward a where the self stands unaided precipitous, dizzying boundary alone, at but for its own resources, before the seemingly tangible earth hand with its remoteness of bewildering multiplicity of life, the of space, the endless rhythms the turns of and and the elusive of and nature, night day, within, images memory and of human the and ecsta dream, the irrationality uncertainty behavior, griefs sies that accumulates. Here the Kinnell is of living poet?and Galway certainly own this company?is thrown back upon his perceptions; his art must be the to a man's own or it is its basic authoritative testimony experience, meaningless; rests that validity upon premise. a more "Perhaps to degree than is true of other poets, Kinnell's development will on a depend the actual events of his life," James Dickey remarked prophetically in a we as an review of What Kingdom ItWas;2 for what encounter essential ingredi ent in his work as it grows is not only the presence of the poet as man and speaker but his identification, through thematic recurrences, repeated images of his concerns and most with the revelatory deepest urgent feelings, experiences his poems dramatize. In what follows we shall try to see how Kinnell, using the considerable imaginative and linguistic powers at his command from the begin ning, explores relentlessly the actualities of his existence to wrest from them what can. we significance for life he Through the compelling force of his art, find our on selves engaged this arduous search with him. we With the advantages of hindsight should not be surprised when we notice that a the initial poem of What Kingdom ItWas, aptly entitled "First Song," is located corn out of doors?in Illinois fields with frog ponds nearby?and that in the course of its three stanzas there is a movement from "dusk" into A night. large propor tion of Kinnell's poetry is involved with the natural world, for he is drawn to it in profound ways, has been since childhood, and it provides him with an inex store haustible for his imaginative meditation, if that phrase will do to distinguish a kind of thinking through images and particulars that is integral to the poetic act. But Kinnell's from nature will become stark and rudi images increasingly their bonds with the of human ever more mentary, ordinary range sympathies as he a tenuous, matures; for indeed his poems about killing bird for Christmas buffalo with a murderer dinner, shooting for companion, mountain climbing, out in camping alone the mountains during winter, examining fossils in the cliff above a to frog pond, seeking define himself by identifying with porcupine and bear, bring him finally to the contemplation of what it is to be human in an ex one situation. Under such treme, might say primitive fundamental circumstances 2 Babel to New Byzantium. (Noonday Press: York, 1968), p. 135. 67 Criticism The Iowa Review he faces himself and the conditions of the world simultaneously, without media tion or It should be that Kinnell other means disguise. said, however, employs than nature for to the bone of intimate cutting existence, though acquaintance with other living creatures and with the earth is of primary importance to his work. the of darkness or mentioned a Likewise, imagery blackness, above, plays promi nent part in many poems. The night with its infinite interstellar spaces reminis or cent of those in Pascal Mallarm? haunts Kinnell, heightening his sensitive awareness of immense and void in the universe. In "First emptiness Song," though, these realities are almost details stringent softened, sentimentalized, by pleasant a of smoky, twilight cornfields, croaking frogs, and small group of boys making as "cornstalk violins" and "scraping of their joy" night falls. Pleasurable nostalgia an fills the poem, yet the final lines perhaps disclose something more, indication a as as of life's mixed blessings, prediction of pain well exultation: A boy's hunched body loved out of a stalk The first song of his happiness, and the song woke His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy. its it in However muted this passage, however conventional emotion, does reflect, across a the poet's backward look time, recognized moment of anticipation of those paradoxes of living which the years afterwards must inevitably make mani fest. enter on A number of the poems that follow more precipitously the confusions and conflicts only hinted at in "First Song." At the risk of emphasizing the obvious, au one should note how these poems dramatize through crucial incidents in the thor's the from a state of and innocence into a state of youth passage ignorance which derives from a first-hand experience knowledge of guilt, violence, hypocrisy, and death. comes Unavoidably, in treating this difficult awakening to experience, Kinnell up a senses or against the disturbing incongruities boy between the spiritual religious training he has received and the harsh facts of the world he begins to meet. "First "To Christ Our this area not exhaust it Communion" and Lord" explore but do is a concern his on for Kinnell; it major of first book. The former poem focuses the from church His remoteness from the formal boy's estrangement religion. pieties is evident in the opening lines, which start by defining the physical dis tance to over in next and move from home church "way the county" immediately to a secular recollection of made "the same the completely having trip" preceding a sackful of ears to collect/The nickel-an-ear year "carrying porcupine bounty." The contrast between the spiritual realities supposedly represented by the church and the tough-minded, earthy attitude of the porcupine hunters who slice off the ears of their prey to collect a reward hardly needs remarking, though it prepares for the manner in which the interior of the church and the sacrament of commun are next manner: ion conceived in the lines?a totally material Pictured on the wall over dark Jerusalem a Jesus is shining?in the dark he is lamp. is a On the tray he pasty wafer. 68 seem The perception here doesn't to get beyond the tangibility of the objects: all more. is what it appears to be and nothing But the picture of Jesus is described an use ones with ambiguity and of detail linking the lines with many later in Kin nell's At the has a material the poems. first, portrait merely resplendence, quality of the painting; then that resplendence plays upon the light/darkness imagery we associate with ths prologue to St. John's gospel. Yet in terms of the kind of sym bolic weight with which Kinnell continues to endow his images of light and lamps and flames, and his contrary images of darkness and night, the figure of Jesus is fundamentally implicated with human hopes and desires to escape the "dark of the world.