SOURCE: "From Irony to Lyricism: Galway Kinnell's True Voice," in Critical Essays on Galway Kinnell, New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1996, pp. 218-25.

[In the following essay, Taylor traces Kinnell's "poetic evolution, " from a Christian theology to a sacramentalism that elevates "numinous moments,".]

To read the poetry of Galway Kinnell is to witness a poetic evolution. The Kinnell canon includes nine volumes of poetry and offers a paradigm for the present-day romantic struggling to free himself from his Christian inheritance yet to affirm that the world contains order, meaning, and the sacred. Kinnell's poetry begins with an attempt to reconcile Christian theology, particularly the resurrection, with human mortality and suffering. As this effort proves futile, he surrenders explicitly Christian references in favor of a natural theology that views the world as sacramental and emphasizes immanence over transcendence. Natural theology does not define the Absolute as a Being. Instead of Christian theism, Kinnell's notion of God is of Being itself which is embedded in creation. There is no transcendent realm over against creation. We might call Kinnell's sense of the holy a nontheistic sacramentalism, or echo Nathan Scott in calling it "panentheism."¹ Charles Altieri offers perhaps the clearest description:

For the postmoderne, meaning and significance tend to depend on the immanent qualities manifested in the particular. As Olson put it, meaning is "that which exists through itself," or in Roethke's terms, "intensely seen, image becomes symbol"—a symbol is not a way of raising particulars to higher orders of significance … but a particular charged with numinous force. This does not mean there are no universale, only that the universals that matter are not conceptual structures but energies recurring in numinous moments.²

In short, Kinnell's poetry develops from Christian to natural theology, from irony to lyricism, and from pessimism to affirmation and joy. The initial poems depict the gulf between the contingencies of existence and the assertions of Christian theism. As he drops theistic references, his vision becomes sacramental and brings the holy into his poems.

Although raised a Congregationalist, Kinnell is most authentic as a romantic, not a Christian poet. The romantic is, more than anything else, alone. The old gods or myths are no more. One is left to discover meaning on personal terms. The romantic existence is, therefore, unmediated. No longer does one have the Incarnation or God-man as mediator; no longer are there rituals which recreate sacred time. One faces, as George Steiner says, a "world gone flat."³ Yet an unmediated world is also a world of possibilities, for it can be made profane or sacred. John S. Dunne points out:

The modern man … finds his hell and purgatory on earth in the form of despair, and he seeks accordingly to find his heaven upon earth too, perhaps in some ideal change of circumstances or inwardly in some kind of inner assurance.⁴

The task, therefore, is to create one's own mythos and entails a fundamental redefining of the connectedness of human-world-divine to discover what, if any, sacred realm remains. Whereas the orthodox Christian's relation to the world is a derivative of the relation to the Christ, the romantic seeks to discover a relation to the world that allows or even causes the sacred to be revealed.

In his first two volumes, First Poems and What a Kingdom It Was, Kinnell essentially fights the wrong battle. He argues against his religious upbringing instead of accepting romanticism. It is as if Kinnell has to kill his parental ghosts before he can speak in his own voice. The protagonists of these poems cling to a mediated existence and, in so doing, confront the inadequacy of the Christian mythos for the complexities of contemporary existence. They continue to look for transcendence in a flat world and to look in vain. The result is a poetry which is ironic, pessimistic, and unromantic. Not surprisingly, an orthodox critic like Donald Davie claims that in these poems Kinnell "should not having turned his back on Christian dispensation, continue to trade surreptitiously in scraps torn arbitrarily from the body of doctrine he has renounced."⁵

The central problem is death. For Kinnell, theology is at best an evasion of human mortality and at worst a delusion:

Theology and philosophy, with their large words, their abstract formulations, their airtight systems, which until recently they imagined forever, deal with paradigms of eternity. The subject of the poem dies.⁶

Kinnell's point is that to begin with a myth is to begin from the wrong direction. Conceptualization dilutes one's sense of reality; it distorts one's vision. Because existence does not fit a system, the early poems are filled with irony. Kinnell depicts the dilemma in these terms: "The poetics of heaven agree to the denigration of pain and death; in the poetics of the physical world these are the very elements."⁷ The poetics of heaven offer explanations; the poetics of the physical world offer one a sense of existence, Elsewhere, Kinnell says, "What do we want more than that oneness, which bestows—which is—life? We want only to be more alive, not less."⁸ For him, to be alive is to relinquish one's preconceptions of existence and to accept the inevitable duality of existence: joy/pain and life/death. These first poems, therefore, demonstrate the inadequacy of the poetics of heaven.

"Easter" is representative. The focus of the poem is death—specifically the death of a "virgin nurse." "Raped, robbed, weighed, drowned," her body drifts below the river's surface. Although the poem's protagonist wishes a resurrection for her—"In the floating days may you discover grace"—the poem offers little hope of its occurrence. In this world, rather:

Death is everywhere, in the extensive
Sermon, the outcry of the inaudible
Prayer, the nickels, the dimes the poor give,
And outside, at last, in the gusts of April.⁹

Death, therefore, is unalterable and pandemic. Humankind can wait and pray for resurrection, but there is little chance that anyone will emerge from the tomb. The only hint of any afterlife is the sea, the body's final destination. It signifies a return to universal nature. The thrust of the poem, however, is to demonstrate the distance between theology and existence. Death exists in the very sermon that denies its reality. The body does not rise but will forever drift. If grace is to occur, it will not negate death's finality. Grace is possible in Kinnell's world, but to occur it must be translated from Christian to natural theology. The later volumes contain such occurrences because by then the translation is complete.

The style of the poem is also quite different from those that follow. Its formality is uncharacteristic. Kinnell feels that "rhyme and meter, having lost their sacred and natural basis, amount to little more than mechanical aids for writing.¹⁰ These devices made sense if one believed in a "natural harmony" or sought "to call back in poetry, the grace disappearing from everything else."¹¹ The contemporary poet is not interested in either endeavor. Living an unmediated existence, he cannot go by any models but seeks to create a new voice—a voice that "does not subjugate speech, but conforms to its irregular curves, to the terrain itself."¹² That Kinnell here adopts rhyme indicates both the inauthenticity of this voice and an attempt, modelled on the concept of Easter, to fit a dynamic reality into a static form.

An equally clear example of Kinnell's ironic use of Christian subjects is "The Supper After the Last." Christ returns in the poem, but his message is, surprisingly, that death is final:

Here the poet points to future poems. To understand the essence of Christ's message—that one is to become a vehicle for and a receiver of grace—is paradoxically to let go of theology. Humans are miraculous as they exist. Instead of hoping for redemption beyond this world, one is to look for it within this world. In short, grace will be immanent and not transcendent.

To deny death, therefore, is to block grace from occurring. The poem opens with an example of the futility of such a gesture:

At the poem's end, the Christ returns to affirm the permanence of the shadow or death:

I cut to your measure the creeping piece of darkness
That haunts you in the dirt. Step into the light—
I make you over. I breed the shape of your grave in the dirt
(P. 102)

The Christ has not come promising resurrection but death and, as a result, the tone of the poem is dark and ironic. Kinnell presents the attempt of translating the language of faith into the actuality of existence as doomed to failure. As the Christ of the poem admits, the distance is too great: "You are the flesh; I am the resurrection" (p. 102). Whatever the nature of the Christ, whatever the claims of theology, humankind's dilemma remains a certain extinction with no promise of an afterlife. As long as one hopes for a heaven above time, one misses the fullness of the present. Eternity is to be found existentially. Kinnell writes elsewhere:

In the desolation of the universe, the brief, tender acts, the beauty that passes, which belong to life in the world, are the only heaven.¹³

His religious vision, then, is an inversion of orthodoxy. Instead of "The Word was made flesh," his poem "The Descent" claims, "In the cry / Eloi! Eloi! flesh was made word" (p. 92). Creation is not an expression of an already existent deity. Rather, in its depth creation gives expression to the sacred. The Christ was not the Word in the beginning, but becomes the word by fully being flesh. In his essay, Kinnell explains, "Zeus on Olympus is a theological being; the swan who desires a woman enters the province of poetry. In Eloi, Eloi, laura sabacthani, so does Jesus."¹⁴ The universe is dynamic and demands the "poetics of the physical world" for expression of its sacred dimension. To put this differently, grace can be found if one lives a full existence in the present moment. Like rhyme and meter, theology leads to a false existence and a false poetry. In those moments in the gospels when Jesus was living authentically, he gave expression to wondrous poetry. Christ crucified can be a mediator but not Christ resurrected.

The poetry of the early Kinnell is, therefore, unsatisfactory because he has yet to find his true voice. He points to a sacramental view of the world and suggests that an attentiveness to the very things and beings of life brings one into a participation of mystery. Existence is to be an ongoing revelation of a natural grace, but his revelation only occurs if one accepts death. These early poems hint at this vision but fail to give it adequate expression because of their concern with showing the inadequacy of a Christian concept of resurrection and immortality. Irony, after all, is rarely a vehicle for grace. This Kinnell is actually closer to Robinson Jeffers than to Thoreau, Williams, or Roethke. It is only after he discards all Christian references and relinquishes his attempt at reconciliation that he joins his true literary ancestors.

The poems in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words are radically different from the earlier work. Instead of ironic, they are lyrical. Instead of the futile attempt to make the Word flesh, these begin with the flesh and sometimes discover the words of grace. In these poems, however, grace is not expressed in words but in music. The logic of this metaphor is obvious. Music is nonverbal and is, therefore, based on nonrepresentational logic. Since music does not separate subject and object, the poet can more easily express an existent unity of fundamental connectedness to the universe. Lastly, music exists in time. It begins and ends. One can become part of it while it lives, but there is no delusion that it points to an existence above time.

Kinnell is not, of course, the creator of this metaphor. Since Ptolomaic cosmology music has been associated with divine order. Henry David Thoreau, however, is Kinnell's most immediate precursor. Walden describes Emerson's self-reliant person as one who steps "to the music which he hears, however, measured or far away."¹⁵ In his essay "The Service," Thoreau indicates the true source of harmony: "To the sensitive soul the universe has her own fixed measure and rhythm, which is its measure also and constitutes the regularity and health of its pulse."¹⁶ To discover the sacred is to align oneself with the rudimentary rhythms that pervade the world. These can only be found by attending to the particulars of nature. For Thoreau, grace enables one to align the inner sense of order with an outer, but for Thoreau there is a greater sense of an external order than with Kinnell. The cost of giving up theism is that meaning increasingly becomes solely existential and private. Thoreau equates the personal harmony with the Universal. The modern or postmodern poet wonders if perhaps music does not come from the heavens but only from the self. Thoreau offers a metaphor for grace, but Kinnell extends the metaphor by making grace more private.

"There Are Things I Tell to No One" offers the most explicit expression of this image:

I say "God"; I believe,
rather, in a music of grace
that we hear, sometimes, playing to us,
from the other side of happiness.
When we hear it, when it flows
through our bodies, it lets us live
these days lighted by their vanity
worshipping—as the other animals do,
who live and die in the spirit
of the end—that backward-spreading
brightness. And it speaks in notes struck
or caressed or blown or plucked
off our own bodies.¹⁷

The "music of grace" is Kinnell's "flesh made word." It comes from the body and flows through the body. As the agent of grace, the music affirms the essential connectedness of creation in time. It sounds not from the other side of life but from the other side of happiness. It enables us to worship the life force in "the spirit of the end."

Later in the poem, the music again sounds and reunites the persona with life's rhythms:

Yes. I want to live forever.
I am like everyone. But when I hear
that breath coming through the walls,
grace-notes blown
out of the wormed-out bones,

…..

then it is not so difficult
to go out, to turn and face
the spaces which gather into one sound…. ¹⁸

The essential music of existence brings grace. Its rhythm connects the human with that which is essential and, in so doing, shows the sacramental nature of reality. The depth of life is founded on the fact of death; the "grace-notes" are "blown / out of the wormed-out bones." As Kinnell says elsewhere:

Everyone who truly sings is beautiful
Even sad music
requires absolute happiness:
eyes, nostrils, mouth strain together in quintal harmony
to say Joy and Death well.¹⁹

The music, or poetry, comes from harmonizing death with life.

The stylistic differences between earlier and later poems are obvious as the content. Instead of a tight formal stanza and rhyme, the poems are in free verse and employ a speech rhythm. Most of all the perspective of the persona is subjective. He is looking through existence to discover meaning instead of down on existence from a detached position.

Perhaps Kinnell's most affirmative poem is "The Still Time." The poem opens with a frank expression of faith:

I know there is still time—
time for the hands
to open, for the bones of them
to be filled
by those failed harvests of want,
the bread imagined of the days of not having.²⁰

"Still" has its double meaning: "yet" and "not moving." Each sense expresses Kinnell's faith in the powers of creation for renewal. The bread of life is immanental, in time. The hope is not for life after death but a deepening of life before; that is, for chronos to change to kairos.

The poem ends with a passage that echoes Hopkins' celebration for the sheer mystery and wonder of existence:

as though a prayer had ended
and the changed
air between the palms goes free
to become the glitter
on common things that inexplicably shine.

And all the old voices,
which once made broken off, choked, parrotincoherences,
speak again,
this time on the palatum cordis, all of them
saying there is time, still time,
for those who groan
to sing,
for those who can sing to heal themselves.²¹

This is a world of participation: human with natural and the living with the dead. The common things shine inexplicably. Again the flesh becomes word. The final result is to sing or to join in the natural rhythm. The world, therefore, is sacramental; it is the vehicle for grace. Grace in this context satisfies "our deepest desire, which is to be one with all creation."²² Kinnell typically insists upon the mixture of joy and pain. It is "those who groan" who sing. Moreover, in an unmediated world, one must heal oneself—albeit with creation's help. "The Still Time" shows the possibilities for a religious view that remains faithful to human mortality yet affirms the possibility of ecstasy in time.

There are, then, two Galway Kinnells. As long as he seeks to emulate Milton and to "justify the ways of God to man," the poet can only write in a voice that is ironic, pessimistic, and, finally, false. All that he affirms is the fact of death. When he alters his direction and focuses on the flesh itself, the poet's voice is lyrical, affirmative and true. The world becomes sacrament; creation becomes a choir that sings of "Joy and Death."

Kinnell's career demonstrates the difficulty of remaining true to the givens of modern existence while using the Christian myth as a paradigm. Perhaps in a world of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Ethiopia all one can see is Christ crucified. For Kinnell this leads to irony. For others it might lead to apologetics. A few certainly can still see such occurrences and witness the resurrection. Galway Kinnell's poetic development is not paradigmatic for all contemporary poets, nor does it demonstrate that poetry can no longer be orthodox. Rather, Galway Kinnell's poetry shows that the sacred dimension can be found in contexts which are not explicitly Christian and even explicitly non-Christian. His poems call for an expansion of interpretations of grace and sacrament. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once stated that the modern task is discovering how to speak "in a secular fashion of God."²³ In his later poems Galway Kinnell has made such a discovery.

Notes

¹ Nathan Scott, The Wild Prayer of Longing: Poetry and the Sacred (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 58.

² Charles Altieri, Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960's (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979), p. 42.

³ George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 55.

⁴ John S. Dunne, A Search for God in Time and Memory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 216.

⁵ Donald Davie, "Slogging for the Absolute," in On the Poetry of Galway Kinnell: The Wages of Dying, ed. Howard Nelson (Ann Arbor: Univer-sity of Michigan Press, 1987), p. 151.

⁶ Galway Kinnell, "The Poetics of the Physical World," The Iowa Review, 2 (1971), p. 125.

⁷ Kinnell, p. 119.

⁸ Galway Kinnell, "Poetry, Personality, and Death," in Claims for Poetry, ed. Donai Hall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982), p. 230.

⁹ Galway Kinnell, The Avenue Bearing the initial of Christ into the New World (Boston) Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 58. All further references to this work appear in the text.

¹⁰ Kinnell, "Poetics," p. 113.

¹¹ Kinnell, "Poetics," p. 113.

¹² Kinnell, "Poetics," p. 120.

¹³ Kinnell, "Poetics," p. 122.

¹⁴ Kinnell, "Poetics," p. 125.

¹⁵ Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings (New York: The Modern Library 1981), p. 290.

¹⁶ Henry David Thoreau, "The Service," in Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 11.