[During the two decades that span the second world war], changes began to occur [in American poetry]: Olson's "Projective Verse" and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" were clear signs, at least with the comfort of retrospection, that a new poetics was developing. It might be instructive to trace some of the lineaments of this new idiom by focusing on one poet's career for a certain period, namely that of Galway Kinnell in the 1960s.

Kinnell's poetry of this period involves itself with a virtual rediscovery of how to view objects intensely, while continuing to avoid any prescribed system. Even as early as his long poem "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World" … Kinnell's poetry has been celebratory and inclusive in its characteristic attitude toward the world of objects. "There are more to things than things," says one modern French philosopher, and the contemporary poet instinctively agrees; but how to discover that "more" without falling into mere attitudinizing remains problematic. Pound taught his successors, who include most American poets, that no authority could replace personal testament, especially when such testament involved accurate perception and attentive apperception. But poets could still remain estranged from things; they might fall into a glorified listing of the mundane, or make the operations of the mind so dominant that the poems would lose their subjects in a welter of "impressions." Pound's influence dominated developments in American poetry so completely that poets as diverse as, say, Robert Creeley and William Meredith could easily refuse to yield to each other in their admiration for Pound's accomplishments…. Kinnell took from Pound, however, only so much as could fruitfully be grafted onto the traditions of Blake and Whitman; and, though for some Pound's concern with "technique" might seem inimical to inspiration, such need not be the case. Pound's concern with objective "vision" on the physiological level corrects rather than replaces the concern with the "visionary." But Kinnell was still faced with the problem of how to bring his poetry out of the modernist cul-de-sac of irony into a postmodernist aesthetic. He did this in large measure by two actions, which may appear contradictory but are in fact complementary: self-discovery and self-destruction, the heuristic and the incendiary actions of poetry. Kinnell became a shamanist, rather than a historicist, of the imagination.

The first volume to contain poems Kinnell wrote in the sixties was Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964), a book divided into two parts, the first heavily concerned with cityscapes and urban consciousness, and the second almost totally rural in its subjects and locales. The last poem of the first section, "For Robert Frost," offers a convenient transition into the second section, a transition important for the next volume, Body Rags (1969), filled as it is with a poetry of nature rather than of history. Such a reductive distinction can be misleading, of course, and it may help to look briefly at the poem for Frost to see in part how Kinnell views America's most famous "nature poet."… [Kinnell] sees Frost as "cursed," not perhaps as the same sort of poète maudit as Melville, but as someone tied to, perhaps bound down by, his bourgeois virtues of self-reliance and rugged individualism. The obverse of those virtues reflects the loneliness, the alienation, in Frost's life, the "desert places," against which confusion the poems offer only a "momentary stay." This surely is the side of Frost that most attracts Kinnell …, and he almost appears to be exorcising those other, civilized virtues of Frost that made him such a master ironist. When we look back on this poem from the perspective of Kinnell's two latest books, the most stringent criticism of Frost he proposes may be when he says that the older poet was "not fully convinced he was dying." Such an affirmation of life against death will become for Kinnell a weakness, a mark of the weak self-love, an unwillingness to accept the "last moment of increased life." (pp. 98-100)

Along with death, Kinnell places pain at the base of his poetics, and pain plays a large part in the poems of Flower Herding. The first section of the book is concerned with pain as a subject, or at least as a surrounding condition of other subjects. Chief among these subjects, Kinnell places an awareness of time's ongoingness, an intense awareness that this particular moment, this now is isolate, thrown up by itself to baffle and defeat human expectations…. The images [in the first poem of the book, "The River That Is East,"] of mists, scum, and shrouds should remind us of how early Kinnell was involved in a poetry obsessed with death and pain, a product of a consciousness in which sharp juxtapositions and sudden changes of perspective appear endemic. The root and the flower of his experience exist without any system except what they may discover for themselves in an existential framework.

It is in section II of Flower Herding that we find the first seeds of Kinnell's "poetics of the physical world," as that poet concentrates on natural, as opposed to urban, objects, moments, and landscapes. Here, too, pain and death are present, almost omnipresent. But the isolate moments, the "leaked promises" of continuity, or of wholeness, become, in the rural setting, moments of ecstasy. The perspective of the future as "a vague, scummed thing / we dare not recognize" fades into a more empty perspective, perhaps; but it is that very emptiness that constitutes such promise for Kinnell. As Kinnell suggests in "The Poetics of the Physical World," death represents the last, absolute perspective; its very finality makes it a magnificent possibility, or rather, the source of magnificent possibilities…. Reading Flower Herding as part of a putative spiritual autobiography, the reader will decide that it is only when Kinnell escapes the city for the country that the possibilities of mortality become positive rather than negative. When we regard Flower Herding as the barometer of other, larger currents at work in American poetry in the sixties, it clearly stands with Bly's Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962) and Wright's The Branch Will Not Break (1963). These three books can be seen as developments away from the ironic mode practiced and perfected by, among others, Ransom, Tate, Nemerov, and Wilbur, and toward a poetic mode first announced by Theodore Roethke as early as 1950, but largely unheeded until ten years later. Here is Roethke characterizing the lyric poet in "Open Letter," from On the Poet and His Craft:

He must scorn being "mysterious" or loosely oracular, but be willing to face up to a genuine mystery. His language must be compelling and immediate: he must create an actuality. He must be able to telescope image and symbol, if necessary, without relying on the obvious connectives: to speak in a kind of psychic shorthand … He works intuitively, and the final form of his poem must be imaginatively right.

Such phrases as "psychic shorthand" and "telescop[ing] image and symbol" illuminate the shifts in perspective and the imagistic density that make the typical Kinnell poem…. [In the final lines of the title poem of Flower Herding, heaven] and the void vie with each other to be the flower's proper domain; the flower makes claims it cannot demonstrate, and yet it forgives itself; it needs its covertness in order to survive, and yet it must utter itself, make known and articulate its "invisible life." All of these contradictory impulses suggest that we can "interpret" the flower as an image from the processes of nature and as a symbol for the act of writing the poem, or even for the psychic paradoxes of the poet himself.

Nowhere are such leaps from the imagistic to the symbolic made clear; in fact, the tone of the poem occasionally works against such leaps, especially in the last line. But the pain and the ecstasy of the consciousness that employs such telescopings tell us that aspiration and acceptance are two aspects of the same intentionality. We might even say that the dialectic between aspiration and acceptance provides the central energy of the poem and that that dialectic reveals its terms most clearly in the tone of a line such as "A wrathful presence on the blur of the ground," where overtones of an almost biblical phrasing terminate in the flatness of the final five words. But the flatness of such a termination, along with phrases like "breaks off," can't be called ironic, at least not if we use irony to mean a kind of qualifying defensiveness. If anything, the variations in texture in these lines reflect quite openly the actuality of the circumscribed transcendence in the poem, circumscribed because it sustains itself only through an acceptance of death. And the persistence of fire and death imagery throughout Kinnell's poetry forces us to disregard, or at least to minimize, the habitual expectation of ironic distance that we bring to much modern poetry. His obviously attempts to be a poetry of immersion into experience rather than of suspension above it.

Kinnell's next book after Flower Herding presents several difficulties; these result in part simply because several of the single poems in Body Rags are difficult ("The Last River" and "Testament of the Thief"), but also because the mode of expression throughout can seem half-formed, occasionally alternating between the densely remote and the flatly commonplace. At least seventeen (out of twenty-three) of the poems are constructed in "sections," and the section becomes the organizing principle of The Book of Nightmares as well as of the best poems in Body Rags: "The Poem," "The Porcupine," and "The Bear." But eight of the poems in Body Rags contain only two sections each, and these represent, I think, some of Kinnell's least successful poems. At the same time, the concentration of imagery and attention that they contain, along with the multiple and shifting perspectives, eventually culminates in what remains Kinnell's typical strength…. Postmodernist poetry insofar as it rejects or moves beyond irony, runs the risk of sentimentality on the one hand and of being "loosely oracular" on the other. [In "Night in the Forest"], the "blood winding / down its ancient labyrinths" is susceptible to either charge, though perhaps especially the latter. Such resonance as the poem does have originates in the subtly controlled tone and syntax of the last few lines. But, considering the total statement of the poem as a dialectic between its two "sections" doesn't particularly increase our appreciation of it. The poem goes beyond descriptive prettiness only by hinting at emotions that would probably be mawkish if further explored.

But it is ungracious to consider at too great a length any failings in Body Rags when that volume contains at least three poems that have already come to enjoy a wide and deep esteem: "The Poem," "The Porcupine," and "The Bear." These are the three poems in which Kinnell moves most clearly beyond the suspension of irony toward the immersion of empathy, and they are, I believe, sure indicators of a new postmodern aesthetic in contemporary American poetry. (pp. 100-04)