SOURCE: "Galway Kinnell: Moments of Transcendence," in The Princeton Library Chronicle, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1963, pp. 56-70.

Galway Kinnell was born in 1927 in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in Pawtucket. He came to Princeton in the summer of 1944 and after only one semester joined the Navy. Six months later he returned to Princeton in the V-12 program and graduated at midyears in 1948. He then took an M.A. at the University of Rochester. His life since then has followed an alternating pattern common among American poets of his generation: teaching and travel, academic appointments and foreign fellowships. For two years he taught at Alfred University, and for three more he was Director of the Liberal Arts Programs at University College in the University of Chicago. Then in 1955 a Fulbright Fellowship took him to Paris to translate the poetry of Villon, and he stayed for another year as a lecturer at the University of Grenoble. In 1957 he came back to America and to New York University, first as a research associate and then as a teacher in the adult education program. In 1960 he was appointed Fulbright Professor at the University of Teheran, and the journey there and back took him around the world. The same year, Houghton Mifflin brought out his first volume of verse, What a Kingdom It Was.¹ In 1961 he was again in France, working on his translation of Villon, which will be published by The New American Library (Mentor Books). Since the spring of 1962, he has been living in New York and Vermont, giving poetry readings at various colleges and working on his second volume of poems, Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock, which will appear next year. This summer he worked for CORE, registering Negro voters in Louisiana. He has received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation for his poetry and also an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

In a review of the poetry of Charles Bell, Kinnell wrote: "It is good to see bold and rational verse appearing after years of experiment on the verbal level…. It is as though what we used to call the 'avant-garde' has scoured the Victorian decay and narrowing, making it possible for poets now to re-attach themselves, with purity of language and greatly broadened subject matter, to the continuing tradition of Western poetry." Such "re-attachment," he declared, is "not a reversion but a fruitful and needed going forward." This statement suggests Kinnell's own practice and intention. The tradition to which his best poetry "reattaches" is that of transcendental and religious meditation—what Kinnell might call "sacred poetry." But if his work may be considered "rational" in its attachment to tradition, it is "bold" in its continuing development towards a more radical insight and a freer style. Today, indeed, Kinnell considers himself "a kind of unknown avantgarde."² His poetry is thus a "going forward": to understand its progress we need to consider the changes in his poetic models and theories as well as in the poetry itself.

The most important influences in his verse are those of Frost, Yeats, and Whitman. All three poets share a surface simplicity and a preference for the idiomatic and colloquial, the grace and toughness of actual speech—what Kinnell calls purity of language. But each is also felt as an individual presence: Frost in Kinnell's recourse to nature as norm and enigma, the special locus of revelation; Yeats in the structural deployment of image and symbol; Whitman in an intense social consciousness and a "oneness with all things." New England landscapes, recurrent imagery of birds, the free flowing line and the deliberately unpoetic catalogue—these stylistic trademarks are as reminiscent as the manner of individual poems: that of Frost in "First Song," of Yeats in "Descent," of Whitman in "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World." Frost is an early and Whitman a more recent model, but the influence of Yeats has been continuous.

It was at Princeton that Kinnell read Yeats for the first time, with overwhelming effect. "I tried to make them all sound like Yeats. No one else could have told I was imitating Yeats, but if they didn't sound like Yeats to me, I didn't think they were poems. It took a long time to get over that." But in Kinnell's earliest published lyrics, the influence of Frost is even more evident in the natural settings, the deftly rhyming stanzas, the personal and retrospective mode. It was Whitman who changed his notion of what a poem is, showing that the lines laid down by Frost are not the only ones "or that it is perhaps wrong to have lines at all." Frost has compared free verse to tennis without a net; Kinnell admits that meter and rhyme are the best way to play the game, "but what if it is not a game but a war?" For Kinnell, every poem is now part of the poet's life, and his rhymes and rhythms have become increasingly free as he seeks to achieve a more authentic utterance, "to throw the responsibility for the poem wholly on speech itself." Today he considers Whitman the significant influence in his writing. "They speak of Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound as having purified the language, but Whitman's language—smack in the nineteenth century—seems to me more alive than Pound's. I can't read nineteenth-century English poetry now: every word has been dipped in nostalgia. But in Whitman ordinary and average things are seen in a sacred light. He was the really democratic poet, who standing among the streets, finds the sacred exists there."

This shift from Frost to Whitman marks a shift in attitude to poetry itself. Kinnell explained his earlier theories in the preface to a selection of his work in The Beloit Poetry Journal. His main thesis was stated in the title: "Only meaning is truly interesting…." Kinnell argued that in much modern poetry, the emphasis on brilliant verbal effects of individual lines and images detracts from the meaning of the poem and the sense of the whole. Such poetry is an imitation of language rather than of nature. Style should be transparent like a window, so that the effect derives from the action or idea described, not from the language of description. He praised Charles Bell for verse stripped of the obvious devices of poetry, nearly as bare as prose. His own "Spring Oak," a straightforward description, was deliberately written in "a style that is almost the absence of style."

A change is evident in Kinnell's review of Larry Eigner. He admires Eigner's poetry "for its closeness to things, its sense of their mystery and realness…." At his best he writes in a state of grace with respect to the real, an openness and trust between himself and the world, by which the two blur and real objects keep dissolving towards a deeper, stranger reality. His best lines are less invented descriptions than the acts themselves of this contact." It is a rare gift: "Many poets, of course, write of common, despised objects, but Eigner comes close to making these things the personages of a sacred poetry." This is the kind of poetry Kinnell is trying to write today. Narrative and description (in the usual sense) have almost disappeared. The words no longer form a transparent window; they seem to be "pressed very close to the thing, as if to a mould": each line is an act of contact. Things cease to be objects and take on a life of their own, become personages; there is "explicit consideration of the mystery of being."

No doubt Kinnell still believes that only meaning is truly interesting, but there has been a shift in the meaning of "meaning." In his preface he wrote that the meaning of a poem "though it may be dimly predicted, emerges only in the creative act. The organizing principle comes into full being simultaneously with its embodying detail. In the successful process there is a unifying light, a single vision of meaning, what might be called its tragic illumination." Such moments of enlightenment occur in "the mysteries of life as well as of poetry": Kinnell set out to recreate them "directly, simply, even reverently." Now if a poem reenacts a moment of enlightenment in the poet's life, then it is a recreation; it is mimetic. But if the meaning is only dimly perceived beforehand and the "unifying light" evolves in the creative act, then the poem itself becomes the moment of enlightenment: it is visionary. Of course these concepts of meaning are not mutually exclusive. In the attempt to recreate a moment of enlightenment, its meaning may change and grow, so that the finished poem becomes the fulfillment of the moment of experience. Many of Kinnell's poems seem to result from this double process of recreation and creation. It will not do to divide his poetry into two chronological periods or generic types, the mimetic and the visionary. Nevertheless, the distinction of vision and mimesis is useful: the tension between these impulses and their constantly shifting relationship seem to affect the form and style of individual poems, the line of Kinnell's development, even his deepest intuitions of meaning.

This interplay is obvious in the poems themselves. "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ" is crowded with objects accurately sensed: the propane-gassed bus making its way through the streets with "big, airy sighs," a red kite wriggling like a tadpole, a pushcart market with its icicle-shaped carrots and "alligator-skinned / Cucumbers, that float pickled / In the wooden tubs of green skim milk." This kind of vivid sensory precision has become a minimum requirement in recent poetry. But in Kinnell's poems, these real objects are transfigured by intimations of deeper, stranger, reality: the tadpole kite, as it "crosses / The sun, lays bare its own crossed skeleton." Kinnell's poetry is grounded in reality, but it works constantly towards such moments of illumination, often in climaxes marked by rhetorical device and heightened diction. Mimesis becomes vision as we read.

In many poems this transfiguration takes the form of an ascent from the real to the ideal. The pattern is consciously Platonic. Kinnell's more ambitious poems, with their deliberate repetition of imagery, their frequent division into contrasting sections, their progression towards a synthesizing moment of vision, recall the strategy of certain poems by Yeats. But they are also modelled on the Platonic dialogue, which—considered as a work of art—Kinnell believes to be one of the great poetic forms. "It proceeds as a poem proceeds, using dialectic, images, characters. By the end the whole thing has been raised to a new level: every statement is transformed, has a meaning beyond itself, like the phrases at the end of a great poem." Platonism thus provides a typical structure and a tacit metaphysic for a poetry which is always moving from the reality into the mystery of things.

If the poem ends in the heavens, however, it must begin with things of earth. A poetry like that of Bell which seeks "redemptive beauty in experience" implies an ugliness that needs to be redeemed. The conjunction of the poetic and the unpoetic is a commonplace of modern verse, and this juxtaposition is already a poetic habit in Kinnell's "First Song," with its contrasts of dung and music, its cornstalks metamorphosed into violins, its paradoxical affirmation of the "sadness of joy." In these early poems, Kinnell felt a need to make claims for the beauty of life, and the dung and cornstalks are necessary to save these claims from sentimentality. With the growing recognition that "life is uglier and more beautiful, both, than at that time I understood," the antitheses grow more extreme. The intuition of the sacred involves its opposite; the visionary imagination hungers for that which challenges its transfiguring power—objects not merely common but despised. Thus in "Easter"—itself an early poem—death confers an unresurrecting grace upon a nurse who has been almost ritually defiled: "Raped, robbed, weighted, drowned." "Where the Track Vanishes" enacts the myth of ascent from earth to heaven, but the goatherd who toils up the mountainside is Pierre le Boiteux, yellow-toothed, hamstrung, hideous in every way. Yet with this increasing stress on the unclean and deformed goes an increasing range of metamorphosis. Pierre becomes Bootes, the heavenly Herdsman; the fields into which he wades are constellations; the track to the churchyard leads out among the stars:

Where the track vanishes the first land begins.
It goes out everywhere obliterating the horizons.
We must have been walking through it all our lives.

So by the tragic principle, negation evokes the vision which affirms. Perhaps this is one reason—artistic rather than biographical—why the recurring subject of these poems is death, for death is the final obstacle, the last enemy to be overcome by the imagination. It is a measure of Kinnell's achievement—and his honesty—that his elegiac poems end with the transcendence and reconciliation proper to the form while actually affirming the personal finality of death.

Kinnell's double commitment to the naturalistic and the visionary shapes and informs his first volume of collected verse. It is divided into four sections, corresponding in sequence to the kinds of poem which have interested him at different times. Each section is arranged chronologically, with the first poems of section II antedating the earliest of section I, and the last of section II postdating the first of section III. But the shape of the book is not quite that of Kinnell's poetic evolution. Many of his early lyrics—including "Spring Oak," his exemplar of the transparent style, and "Indian Bread," a poem he contributed to a collection honoring Robert Frost—do not appear in What a Kingdom It Was. This early verse tends to the mimetic: descriptive or narrative in form, firmly controlled in structure, realistic and clear in style. A number of poems, like those which form the first section of What a Kingdom, deal with an imagined boyhood and young manhood in the Middle West.³ The six poems are arranged symmetrically: an introduction, two contrasted pairs of poems, and a conclusion. The unifying action is initiation. "First Song" tells how at dusk in Illinois—a halfway point in space and time—a boy's first song of happiness "woke / His heart to darkness and into the sadness of joy." In the central poems this ambivalent awareness becomes a growing recognition of the divine and the daemonic in nature and in man. "Westport," a conclusion which is also a beginning, sets the static oppositions of "First Song" in motion, heading from east to west, from dark afternoon to a bright evening, and out of evening into night. But this is more than a metaphor of growing up, for here the action of initiation, with all its threat and promise, is extended to the youth of a society, the expansion of the American frontier. This shift from the individual to the community is repeated in the volume as a whole.

The second section, despite an occasional fine poem or significant pairing ("Easter," or "Alewives Pool" and "Leaping Falls"), is the most heterogeneous and least impressive in the book. It is a collection of short lyrics, very different in subject, tone, and quality. The third section is more unified, consisting of six longer poems divided into parts, predominantly elegiac in mood and mode. The next to last, "Freedom, New Hampshire," is a formal elegy for the poet's brother: personal, nostalgic, touching in its restraint of feeling and its refusal of any supernatural solution. In complement and contrast, the final poem in this section, "The Supper After the Last," treats death impersonally, as a problem in metaphysics. The poem enacts the transition from the mimetic to the visionary: it is centrally concerned with margins and horizons, and here real objects actually do blur and resolve towards deeper, stranger realities. A whitewashed house in sunlight, a jug of water and a chair, the blind cat and "red-backed passionate dog" are rendered with the precision of an Andrew Wyeth, only to be transmuted into a vista out of Dali:

The witnesses back off; the scene begins to float in water;
Far out in that mirage the Saviour sits whispering to the world,
Becoming a mirage. The dog turns into a smear on the sand.
The cat grows taller and taller as it flees into space.

When Kinnell had to select a poem for an anthology called Poet's Choice, he chose "Supper After the Last." It makes a fresh start: "I mean towards a poem without scaffolding or occasion, that progresses through images to a point where it can make a statement on a major subject." Such a poem must evolve its moment of insight in the act of its making: it is purely creative. Here, then, the shift from mimesis to vision is complete. If the book ended here, we could perhaps trace the Platonic structure which Kinnell observes in Bell's volume of poems, progressing from physical details to symbolic meanings, from concrete to abstract. But there remains a fourth section, which consists of a single poem, "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World." And this poem too makes a fresh start. Kinnell acknowledges a debt to The Waste Land and to Baudelaire, but the most striking influence is that of Whitman. Here at last the real and ideal are not juxtaposed in contrast or set in transcendent sequence: they blend and mingle; they become one.

The import of this change is clear only on the level of meaning. But poetic meaning is elusive, and our statements about it must be tentative. Kinnell seems to be a religious poet without religion. That is, his intuitions of the sacred do not seem based on any credal affirmation or institutional faith. He was brought up a Congregationalist, but today he finds churches irrelevant. His notions of transcendence, he asserts, derive from Plato and the Transcendentalists, especially Thoreau. Christianity, like Yeats's Vision, serves as a source of imaginatively potent words and images, grounded in a total and consistent myth. It has two advantages over Yeats's system: Christianity is a public mythology; and in current literary usage, exploitation need not imply belief. But the matter is not all that simple. Kinnell's deep instinct for the suffering and rejected does not derive from Plato or Thoreau. The figure of Jesus haunts these poems. A short story called "The Permanence of Love" dramatizes this ambivalence in the encounter of the unbelieving protagonist and a nun—significantly a petite soeur de Jésus.

The same attraction and withdrawal are expressed in "First Communion" and "To Christ Our Lord," poems juxtaposed in the first section of What a Kingdom It Was. In "First Communion" a boy is repelled by the inadequacy of institutional religion and its rituals, the conjuration of Jesus into grape juice and "inferior bread." He tells Christ

I would speak of injustice….
I would not go again into that place.

The world of nature, burning in late summer and late afternoon, offers a truer "parable" of death and continuity. "To Christ Our Lord" also contrasts dogma with natural parable. The "Christmas grace" is merely "long-winded," but in slaying and devouring a living creature, the boy experiences what he missed in his first communion. Love stirs within him even as he kills, but "There had been nothing to do but surrender, / To kill and eat; he ate as he had killed, with wonder."

At night on snowshoes on the drifting field
He wondered again, for whom had love stirred?
The stars glittered on the snow and nothing answered.
Then the Swan spread her wings, cross of the cold north,
The pattern and mirror of the acts of earth.

Here Christianity and Platonism, "cross" and "pattern," seem to merge: the killing and eating is a sacrament, a finite repetition of the ideal, eternal act of sacrifice. Kinnell's title is the subtitle of "The Windhover," and his wild turkey, like Hopkins' falcon, is emblematic of "Christ Our Lord." But Hopkins' bird is most dangerous and beautiful in stooping, the descent into flesh. The boy in Kinnell's poem looks to the heavenly pattern, the disincarnate Swan. It is more than the difference between the heavenly Logos and the incarnate Christ: it is the difference between Christian incarnation and Platonic transcendence—the point at which Augustine found Platonism, the most Christian of pagan philosophies, to be unchristian.

In much of Kinnell's poetry, then, the intuition of the sacred sets matter against spirit, concrete against abstract. But working against this instinctive dualism is an equally instinctive kinship with all suffering, an impulse which finds expression in his short story as the wish to serve. Countering the upward spiral of transcendence, of the "flesh made word," his poetry also moves outward, horizontally, in sympathy with the commonest forms of life. This is the expanding consciousness of Whitman, who found the sacred not among the stars but in the streets. So in "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ," the kingdom is realized among the perishing humanity of Avenue C. It is a vision of desolating ugliness. Kinnell has ceased to make claims for the beauty of life: "It seems to me now that to become one with a person, or thing, or event and to set it down in its fullness is itself sufficient, or transcends the need for making claims." So in this poem the poet has disappeared; the observer has become one with his subject; there is only the Avenue and the fullness and movement of its life. The tragic illumination of the poem does not come in any cumulative revelation but in "moments of transcendence" drifting in "oceans of loathing and fear," traffic lights blinking through darkness and rain. The representation of reality is uncompromising: walking up Avenue C today, one finds many of the signs Kinnell quotes—Blozstein's Cutrate Bakery, Little Rose Restaurant, Kugler's Chicken Store, Natural Bloom Cigars. But the holy is incarnate in the real. The fourteen divisions of the poem are the fourteen stations of the cross, down the fourteen intersections of Avenue C to the Power Station and East River at the end. So the word is made flesh: at the point where Christ meets Mary his mother, there appears a senile crone dispensing newspapers. Veronica's handkerchief is a stained grocery wrapper; the deposition is accomplished by a garbage truck. This is not symbolism but immanence: fish are simultaneously the traditional figure for Christ and actual gaping carp, crucified upon a wooden counter. An old rabbi is Jacob with his sons; even the vegetables in market carts are omens and images of our condition. The action of the poem is ordeal: as the devotee follows the stations of the cross, sharing in imagination the passion of Christ, so the observer—poet or reader—follows Avenue C. A day passes; the Avenue stretches "From the blind gut Pitt to the East River of Fishes"; and these motions in time and space become the archetype of all human movement. It is the life of man from darkness into dark, from the blind gut to the deep river. It is Israel in exile—the Jews, Negroes, Puerto Ricans who have become God's chosen people because they are despised and rejected of men—bearing, like the Avenue itself, the initial of the suffering man. "From the fourteenth station," writes Kinnell, "one looks back down the whole street and sees it transfigured, but also entirely real." In this transfiguration of reality, death and suffering are not transcended or denied. But against them is set the untiring laughter of the blood, the song of the Jews as they went out of their ghettos to destruction:

Notes

¹ Two significant misprints occur in this edition. In the next to last line of "The Supper after the Last" on p. 64, "Steps" should be "Step" (an imperative). In "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World," the order of fourth and fifth lines from the top of p. 83 has been reversed.

² Quotations not from Mr. Kinnell's poems or essay are from conversation or correspondence with the author.

³ For all their realism, these poems should not be read as autobiographical. James R. Hurt has shown that the best known of them, "First Song," is based on a passage in Wayfaring Stranger by Burl Ives. See The Explicator, XX, No. 3 (November 1961), 23, and the references given there to previous discussions of the poem.