SOURCE: Young, Gloria L. “‘The Fountainhead of All Forms’: Poetry and the Unconscious in Emerson and Howard Nemerov.” In Artful Thunder: Versions of the Romantic Tradition in Honor of Howard P. Vincent, edited by Robert J. DeMott and Sanford E. Marovitz, pp. 241-67. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1975.

[In the following essay, Young outlines the ways in which Nemerov's poetry was prefigured by both Ralph Waldo Emerson's and Carl Jung's ideas of the unconscious.]

For it is the inert effort of each thought … to solidify and hem in the life. … But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses it already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable expansions.¹

It is a commonplace of contemporary poetry, as Northrop Frye has pointed out, that “the natural metaphorical direction of the inside world is downward, into the profounder depths of consciousness”; this, he says, is a “Romantic inheritance.”² It is not, however, commonplace to refer to Emerson as an important source of this inheritance. Emerson's marked influence on twentieth century poetry has been much discussed;³ his aesthetic theory has been most clearly expounded by Vivian C. Hopkins.⁴ Yet, Emerson's intuition of the unconscious as a source of inspiration has not been thoroughly analyzed nor has his anticipation of contemporary theories of the unconscious in poetry been sufficiently recognized.

The purpose of this essay is to confirm that Emerson's ideas of the unconscious anticipate certain psychological, linguistic, and aesthetic theories of Carl Jung, depth psychologist, and Howard Nemerov, poet, critic, and theorist.⁵ In each division of this essay—(1) description of the unconscious; (2) access to it; and (3) confrontation and interaction with it (process and product)—Emerson's ideas will be compared with those of Jung and Nemerov, with statements of other contemporary poets occasionally noted to suggest their awareness of the role of the unconscious in recent American poetry.

It is significant that Emerson sensed and described this “blind wisdom … seminal brain … which seems to sheathe a certain omniscience; and which, in the despair of language, is commonly called Instinct” (XII, 65), and in so doing he delineated concepts which would later be included in a larger circle, complete with psychological vocabulary. Ralph Rusk has pointed out that for Emerson no truth was final, “a bigger circle would include the one just drawn.” If this made Emerson's theories unstable, it was of little concern to Emerson, says Rusk, since he was always confident that “a little later on, if not now, they would be justified by a wise interpretation of experience.”⁶ Emerson probably would view contemporary theories of the unconscious as only another circle, since life “spawns and scorns system and system-makers” (X, 352).

Professor Hopkins, in her scholarly treatment of Emerson's aesthetic theory, discusses his concept of inspiration as beginning with the inflow from the Deity to a mind passively and receptively awaiting it. The difficulty is

that the artist is prevented by reverence for the Deity from complaining when intuitions fail to flow into his mind. Aware of this problem, Emerson denotes the term instinct as the special source of power for the arts and literature. … The action of instinct, in Emerson's theory, is negative rather than positive; though not itself a light, it is the source of illumination for creative artists.

(Spires, pp. 21-22)

Summarizing the “core of Emerson's theory of imagination,” she defines it as the “power of the creative mind to refashion the objects of nature … into symbols of his own thought” (pp. 37-38), but she finds “the gap which exists between the intuition in the artist's mind and its transference to objective matter” is the “principal lack in Emerson's concept of form” (p. 137). It is the same “gap” that Carl Jung (as well as many contemporary poets) believes is bridged through language: the conscious mind submerges into the unconscious, brings up archetypal images (the raw material of the unconscious), and transforms them into symbols. Professor Hopkins admits that Emerson “has studied the sub-ego more carefully than any other contemporary critic, and that he has made definite use of it in relation to aesthetics,” but “without in any real sense anticipating Freud's concept of the subconscious” (p. 183). Twenty years later, however, she supports the view that Emerson's interpretation of dreams “anticipates some present-day psychological theories and methods.”⁷ It seems incredible that Emerson—operating in the dark, suspecting the presence of unconscious power, recognizing an unknown, non-self in his dreams, distrusting it as he distrusted anything unintelligible, struggling to name and describe this force—should have anticipated so much.

I

Constantly beset by the inability of language to describe his intuition of the unconscious, Emerson uses various and sometimes contradictory figures of speech, each suggesting some aspect of his “feeling” of the underlying psyche. Some personifications refer to the Over-Soul (real Being, Essence, God); others refer to a kind of Under-Soul (aboriginal Self, Earth Spirit, Primeval world); still others simply describe the qualities of the unconscious (aboriginal abyss, unknown country, alien energy, secret augury). The term “unconscious,” used by Emerson, is the correct term, according to Jung, since it should not be designated as “subconscious,” being not merely “below consciousness but also above it.”⁸

Emerson frequently used water to symbolize the unconscious:

Earth Spirit, living a black river like that swarthy stream which rushes through the human body is thy nature, demoniacal, warm, fruitful, sad, nocturnal.⁹

Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the aboriginal abyss of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation or a part, but the whole.

(II, 120-121)

The waters of the great deep have ingress and egress to the soul. But if I speak, I define, I confine and am less.

(II, 342)

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. … When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come.

(II, 268)

Sensing the unconscious sometimes as a higher power, sometimes as a lower, Emerson acknowledges: “We see at once that we have no language subtle enough for distinctions in that inaccessible region.” Realizing that there will be objections to representing “the Divine Being as an unconscious somewhat,” Emerson answers that the “unconsciousness we spake of was merely relative to us. … We predicate nothing of its consciousness or unconsciousness in relation to itself” (J., Apr. 27, 1840).

The term Emerson most frequently uses to name the unconscious “potential wit” is Instinct, described as a source of mental power

which pours all the others into its mould;—that unknown country in which all the rivers of our knowledge have their fountains, and which, by its qualities and structure, determines both the nature of the waters and the direction in which they flow.

(XII, 33-34)

Instinct is passive, potential, negative—“a shapeless giant in the cave, massive, without hands or fingers or articulating lips or teeth or tongue; Behemoth, disdaining speech, disdaining particulars, lurking, surly, invincible, disdaining thoughts, always whole, never distributed, aboriginal, old as Nature.” Beginning at this low point, “at the surface of the earth,” it works first for the necessities of man and then “ascends stop by stop to suggestions which are when expressed the intellectual and moral laws.” Instinct is “a taper, a spark in the great night. Yet a spark at which all the illuminations of human arts and sciences were kindled.” And “inspiration,” says Emerson, “is only this power excited, breaking its silence; the spark bursting into flame” (XII, 34-35). Inspiration, an “enlarged power,” accomplishes what is “great and lasting” by leaning on the “secret augury” (VIII, 271), providing the source of genius (II, 64).

Carl Jung, also, used the metaphor of water to describe the unconscious:

Therefore the way of the soul … leads to the water, to the dark mirror that reposes at its bottom. … This water is no figure of speech, but a living symbol of the psyche. … The dreamer descends into his own depths and the way leads him to the mysterious water. … But the breath of the spirit rushing over the dark water is uncanny, like everything whose cause we do not know—since it is not ourselves. It hints at an unseen presence, a numen to which neither human expectations nor the machinations of the will have given life. It lives of itself. … It is a spookish thing and primitive fear seizes the naive mind.

(A.C.U., p. 17)

In psychological terminology, Jung hypothesizes that

In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche, there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals … is inherited … consists of preexistent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.

(A.C.U., p. 43)

Jung differentiates between a “superficial layer of the unconscious,” wholly personal, containing the “feeling-toned complexes” (Freud's concept), and a deeper “collective” layer, containing primordial archetypes that make up a “common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature.” The archetypes, psychic contents not yet “submitted to conscious elaboration,” are, therefore, an “immediate datum of psychic experience” (A.C.U., pp. 3-4). Echoing Emerson's intuition of instinct's determining not only the nature of the waters but the direction in which they flow, Jung states that unconscious archetypes force man's “ways of perception and apprehension into specifically human patterns.”¹⁰ When man feels “menaced by alien powers” (A.C.U., p. 105), he is not inventing but experiencing them.

Paralleling Emerson's and Jung's descriptions of the unconscious, Howard Nemerov uses images of water and light throughout his poetry. The dark and wrinkled sea symbolizes the ground of being, the unconscious, the alien, the Other, as well as the great mother whose salt water flows in man's veins and in his tears. Life, like raindrops or snowflakes, is always merging and flowing, from stream to river to sea. Light images (Emerson's flame) symbolize inspiration, imagination, and mind. It is the imagination that sees, listens, transforms, and reconciles the “pond as birthplace and deathplace, the liquid mother and mirror whence beautiful and terrible forms arise, and whereto they return.”¹¹ Discussing his poem, “Painting a Mountain Stream,” Nemerov describes an “unknowably large part of a material world whose independent existence might be likened to that of the human unconscious, a sleep of causes, a chaos of the possible-impossible, responsive only to the wakening touch of desire and fear—that is, to spirit; that is to the word.”¹² “The image … most appropriate for this nation,” he adds, is the image of a “stream, a river, a waterfall, a fountain, or else of a still and deep reflecting pool.” One must bring to this world an attitude of “attentiveness and obedience,” recognizing, however, that it cannot be plumbed: “The visible way is always down / but there is no floor to the world” (Poets on Poetry [hereafter abbreviated as P.P.], pp. 248-249).¹³

In “The Sanctuary,”¹⁴ Nemerov envisions a trout sanctuary as the “pool of the skull” where images swim. On the floor of the pool, one sees “The numerous springs moving their mouths of sand,” and the trout, “With a delicate bend and reflex / Of their tails … glide”

From the shadowy side into the light, so clear,
And back again into the shadows; slow
And so definite, like thoughts emerging
Into a clear place in the mind, then going back,
Exchanging shape for shade.

The images appear in consciousness and then move back into unconsciousness, or hang “between the surface and the slate / For several minutes without moving, like / A silence in a dream.” As the poet observes the phenomena, his life “Seems to have been suddenly moved a great / Distance away on every side,” as though

The quietest thought of all stood in the pale
Watery light alone, and was no more
My own than the speckled trout I stare upon
All but unseeing. Even at such times
The mind goes on transposing and revising
The elements of its long allegory
In which the anagoge is always death;

While the poet meditates, a trout “pokes through the fabric of the surface to / Snap up a fly. As if a man's own eyes”

Raised welts upon the mirror whence they stared,
I find this world again in focus, and
This fish, a shadow dammed in artifice,
Swims to the furthest shadows out of sight
Though not, in time's ruining stream, out of mind.(15)

The archetypal images may be temporarily dammed through artifice, but being protected and holy, they revert back into unconscious content. Only the moment of flowing can be captured, not the essence; being imperishable, they are not “out of mind,” though “out of sight” in “Time's ruining stream.”¹⁶

In a long poem, “To Lu Chi,” Nemerov describes the unconscious as a “pure and hidden reach,”

Some still, reed-hidden and reflective stream
Where the heron fishes in his own image.

The poem is a reflective debate between a modern poet and Lu Chi (A.D. 302). In the modern world, the poet tells Lu Chi, “They say, the arts, / And poetry first … must wither away.” Even when “all civilisation / Quite visibly and audibly collapses,” they still will not “consult those who consult the source.” “What then? Nothing but this, old sir: Continue” Continue to

Look into the clear and mirroring stream
Where images remain although the water
Passes away.(17)

Similarly, for Emerson poetry is the constant attempt to “pass the brute body” and “to see that the object is always flowing away, whilst the spirit or necessity which causes it subsists” (VIII, 17).

II

The “unknown country in which all the rivers of our knowledge have their fountains” is there, but “How?” asks Emerson, is this source to be tapped? He answers that one must “invent means. … Power is the authentic mark of spirit” (XII, 73). One may sometimes reach it consciously, says Emerson: the “primeval world,—the Fore-World … I can dive to it in myself” (II, 23). The key is to release the will, “to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety” (II, 321-322). One must “subject to thought things seen without (voluntary) thought. … The feeling of all great poets has accorded with this. They found the verse, not made it” (VII, 49-50). New energy, “beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect,” is derived from “abandonment to the nature of things” (III, 26); “we sink to rise” (VIII, 42). The poet's effort is the “least part of his work of art” (VII, 43), his will “only the surrender of will” (I, 213). Thoughts enter and leave minds through “avenues … never voluntarily opened” (II, 286). Emerson mentions having written poems he does not remember composing nor correcting (J., Jan. 1852), elsewhere noting that the artist is often “as much surprised at the effect” as others (VII, 46). Although one can occasionally dive into the unconscious through conscious effort, more frequently such states are “coy and capricious,” not to be “too exactly” tasked and harnessed, having “a life of their own, independent of our wills” (XII, 77). At best, the experience is never consecutive—“A glimpse, a point of view … but no panorama” (VIII, 273).

Usually, access to the unconscious is gained through unconscious means: the dreams and fantasies of early childhood, mythology and fable, sleep, religious ecstasy, madness, the occult, and drugs. Emerson believes the dreams of childhood, myth and fable, and the dreams of sleep to be valid and genuine sources of inspiration, but he is suspicious of the others.

“A sleeping child” seems to Emerson “a traveller in a very far country” (J, Sept. 16, 1840). Mythology, stemming from the childhood of the race, “repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order” (I, 206). Pan, an early and primitive intimation of the All, according to Emerson, is described by him in language echoing his description of Instinct: “refusing to speak, clinging to his behemoth way” (XII, 36). Fable, also, may have in it “somewhat divine” since it came “from thought above the will of the writer … that which flowed out of his constitution and not from his too active invention” (II, 108). If only, laments Emerson, “we could retain our early innocence, we might trust our feet uncommanded to take the right path. … But we have interfered too often” (XII, 37).

By acknowledging the powers of dreams, Emerson emphasizes the unconscious as a generative source of creativity: “In dreams we are true poets; we create the persons of the drama” and they “speak after their own characters, not ours” (VIII, 44-45). That in dreams he “must be the author of both parts of the dialogue … is ever wonderful” (J., Oct. 24, 1866) to Emerson. It is only “by repairing to the fountainhead of all forms” that the artist can be illuminated, “for as soon as we let our will go and let the unconscious states ensue, see what cunning draughtsmen we are” (II, 337). Participation in dreams frees the poet of conscious fetters and transcends “all limit and privacy”; consequently, man becomes “the conductor of the whole river of electricity” (III, 40)—the water and the spark united. Dreams serve to unite the active and passive selves and cause the viewer to see himself as an object—as with a double consciousness. The following passage from “Demonology” is incredibly sound in terms of ideas prevalent today:

Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. … They seem to us to suggest an abundance and fluency of thought not familiar to the waking experience. They pique us by independence of us, yet we know ourselves in this mad crowd, and owe to dreams a kind of divination and wisdom. My dreams are not me; they are not Nature, or the Not-me: they are both. They have a double consciousness, at once sub- and ob-jective. … Wise and sometimes terrible hints shall in them be thrown to the man out of a quite unknown intelligence. … Once or twice the conscious fetters shall seem to be unlocked, and a freer utterance attained. A prophetic character in all ages has haunted them. They are the maturation often of opinions not consciously carried out to statements, but whereof we already possessed the elements.

(X, 7-8)

Through “miracles … enthusiasm … Animal Magnetism; prayer; eloquence; self-healing,” reason may lose its “momentary grasp of the sceptre” and find the “power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous in-streaming causing power” (I, 73). Trances, visions, convulsions, and illumination, also, may be “varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight” when the individual soul mingles with the universal soul (II, 281-282). There are dangers, however, attending the “opening of the religious sense in men” since there is a “certain tendency to insanity” in such men, as if they had been “blasted with excess of light” (II, 281-282). The experience called by the ancients, “ecstasy or absence,—a getting out of their bodies to think,” may come in “terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver” and may drive man mad (IV, 97). Genius, too, has its dangers. Emerson agrees with Aristotle that “no great genius was ever without some mixture of madness” and things grand and superior can be spoken only by the “agitated soul” (VIII, 279). Nevertheless, the result is worth the risk: “Men of large calibre, though with some eccentricity or madness … help us more than balanced mediocre minds” (IV, 98-99).

In addition, access to the unconscious may be gained through the occult: “omens, coincidences, luck, sortilege, magic and other experiences which shun rather than court inquiry.” Although Emerson views the occult with suspicion, he agrees that it may give “hints” to man and “shed light on our structure” (X, 3). Animal magnetism, for instance, sometimes viewed by Emerson as a religious phenomenon and sometimes as a “black art,” nevertheless, seems “to open again that door which was open to the imagination of childhood—of magicians and fairies” (X, 25). Denying the “impatience which cannot brook the supernatural … and the great presentiments which haunt us,” he “willingly” says, “Hail! to the unknown awful powers which transcend the ken of the understanding” (X, 27). Still, such things are not to his liking. “I set down these things as I find them, but however poetic these twilights of thought, I like daylight” (X, 19).¹⁸

The poet, then, in reaching the unconscious, works to an “end above his will, and by means, too, which are out of his will” (XII, 71). The experiencing of the unconscious may bring “terror” and “shock” or “awe and delight.” The “sublime” (II, 267) is felt when the emotion seems to come from above; but the “pain of an alien world,” a world “not yet subdued by thought,” is realized when it comes from below. Emerson asks if the “dire” may be the “act of the imagination when groping for its symbols in these parts or functions of nature which nature conceals because painful to the observer?”¹⁹

One “groping” explanation for man's occasional experience of an alien world may be that he is part of it at an unconscious, unremembered level. At the Jardin des Plantes, his feelings of “occult sympathies,” as if “looking at our bone and flesh through coloring and distorting glasses,” led him to speculate that men still have knowledge of the creatures they hunt (XII, 22). As early as Nature, Emerson felt an “occult relation between man and vegetable” (I, 10), and in “Powers and Laws of Thought,” man seems to Emerson to be a “higher plant” (XII, 24). Man can know nature, having just come out of it, from the “chemic lump” to the plant to the quadruped to the man. “He is not only representative, but participant” (IV, 11). Yet, Emerson believed that what was ugly or beastlike would eventually disappear (I, 76), since in the “secular melioration of the planet” the inharmonious in nature would “become unnecessary” and “die out” (VII, 276).

Like Emerson, Jung recognizes the power, energy, and danger which derives from the confrontation with the unconscious. The experience, Jung says, while “redeeming” and giving power, may also “unleash a dangerous enthusiasm” (S.D., p. 315). Like Emerson again, Jung believes that one may enter the unconscious through certain conscious techniques employed by the “active imagination” (A.C.U., p. 44):

One concentrates one's attention on some dream image, or on visual impression, and observes the changes taking place in it. It brings a mass of unconscious material to light. … The experiences which result differ from dream only by reason of their better form, which comes from the fact that the contents were perceived not by a dreaming but by a waking consciousness.

(A.C.U., p. 190)

Art, intuition, telepathic phenomena are the result of such “creative fantasy” in which “primordial images are made visible” through conscious “perception via the unconscious” (A.C.U., pp. 78, 282, 142).

The unconscious, containing “all the fantasy combinations” (S.D., p. 69), reveals itself in the “psychic phenomena” of dreams, religion, trance states, visions, early childhood fantasies, primitive tribal lore, myth and fairy tale, magic, and insanity (A.C.U., pp. 5, 7, 44). But the further away from immediate experience these archetypes of myth and religion become, the less meaningful they are to man. Emerson's sense of seeing one's self in a dream as an “object,” a “pensioner,” is described by Jung: “In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the factors (makers) themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors” (A.C.U., p. 23). When dealing with the unconscious, Jung comments that “we are more possessed than possessing” (A.C.U., p. 187).

Emerson's intuition of man's “occult relation” with the vegetable-animal world is paralleled by Jung who says that the unconscious contains “forgotten material” of the personal past plus inherited “behaviour traces” constituting the structure of the mind. The unconscious supplements the picture of the human personality with “living figures ranging from the animal to the divine, as the two extremes outside men, and rounds out the animal extreme, through the addition of vegetable” (A.C.U., pp. 69, 188). For Jung, beast images and other negative archetypes belong to the “family of figures which describe the dark, nocturnal, lower chthonic element,” sharing in the “daemonically superhuman” and the “bestially subhuman” (A.C.U., pp. 234, 230), but they are not likely to disappear as Emerson optimistically predicted.

For Howard Nemerov, the unconscious is simply an unknown “other,” which may, under certain conditions, enter consciousness. One cannot define it, since this requires a “talent for mystical experience” (Poetry and Fiction [hereafter abbreviated as P.F.], pp. 11-12), but one may gain access to it through “attentiveness and obedience.” He is drawn to Keats' idea of negative capability, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”: one looks, listens, and transforms (P.P., pp. 248-249). In the process of combining the materials of the “world-in-language,” Nemerov, like Emerson, finds that “once in a great while” the “poet surprises himself, or it surprises him, with thoughts beyond the reaches of his soul.” The self may be “suddenly invaded by the Other, the Outside,” offering the old dream of “divination and esoteric oracular utterance.” Nemerov calls this the “heartbreaking dream of poetry itself, to persuade an indifferent and mighty Nature to respond to the human,” a dream which cannot be accomplished by will alone.²⁰ The poet for Nemerov, as for Emerson, is oracular, vatic, “not speaking so much as spoken through by something other than himself,” which may be thought of as “divinity, Muse, Goddess, Holy Spirit”; the poetic function of the Other is simply to be other, “hence to guarantee that the poet shall express not his silly little personal consciousness but the vast consciousness open to the Other” (S.E., pp. 400-401).²¹

Nemerov chose “Runes” for Poet's Choice, calling it a drama, with progression from “statement through dispute to resolution.”²² The “statement” is in poem I: “This is about the stillness in moving things, / In running water. … That is my theme, of thought and the defeat / of thought before its object.” Thought can only be caught in its flowing since “every tense / Is now.” Nevertheless, “out of this head … Are basilisks who write our sentences” (poem IV). The descent into the waters of the unconscious is described:

To go low, to be as nothing, to die,
To sleep in the dark water …
And through the tangle of the sleeping roots
… and past the buried hulls of things
To come, and humbly through the breathing dreams
Of all small creatures sleeping in the earth;
To fall with the weight of things down on the one
Still ebbing stream, to go on to the end …
Into the pit where zero's eye is closed.

(poem VIII)

As water in the “soft green stalks and tubes” hardens into wood and as the seed is “compacted under pressures” into stone, so are the images soldified into language. The “truth,” however, lies in the flowing quality of the symbol—in the memory of “how the water is streaming still” and of how the division of the seed “pours a stream, between / The raindrop and the sea, running in one / Direction, down, and gathering in its course / That bitter salt” (poem XII). Poem XIV describes the crossing of the threshold, “The water of the eye where the world walks,” and poem XV, the resolution:

To watch water, to watch running water
Is to know a secret. …
It is a secret. Or it is not to know
The secret, but to have it in your keeping,
… it is not knowing, it is not keeping,
But being the secret hidden from yourself.(23)

Nemerov describes the “voice of the eternally other” as a further voice of poetry, about which little can be said except that as certain times it is there, “the resonance that in our repetition of the poet's words seems to come from the outside, when the ‘shadow of an external world draws near’” (P.F., p. 92).²⁴ “Poetry,” Nemerov adds, “is the art of contemplating this situation in the mirror of language” (Emerson calls the world the poet's “mirror and echo” [X, 191]). Through languge, “the marvelous mirror of the human condition,” Nemerov believes the poet can show “the relations between things.” However, “the mirror is a limit, and as such, it is sorrowful; one wants to break it and look beyond.” But outside the garden “where relations grow … is the wild abyss” (P.F., pp. 11-13).

In “The Salt Garden,” the persona of the poem has wrested a garden of relations from the ocean's floor with “much patience and some sweat.” Sitting in his green garden, “in a decent order set,” he watches the work that he has done “Bend in the salt wind.” Becoming aware of “The ocean's wrinkled green,” maneuvering in its sleep, he despises what he had planned—“For what can man keep?” In stanza 2, the gull, “like a high priest / Bird-masked, mantled in grey,” “like a merchant prince / Come to some poor province,” contemptuously surveys the garden. As it vanishes seaward, the gull utters a cry in a “strange tongue but the tone clear,” which seems to tell the poet that the gull has come

… brutal, mysterious,
To teach the tenant gardener,
Green fellow of this paradise
Where his salt dream lies.

(The Salt Garden [hereafter abbreviated as S.G.], pp. 41-43)

The poet realizes he is only a tenant, a “pensioner,” as Emerson says; the salt sea in his garden, his veins, and his tears, tells him he is “participant” only. The Other can invade man's rationally ordered world and menace his imagined unity. In Emerson's words, the “bitten world” (“the gnat grasping the world” [XII, 11]) may hold the “biter fast by his own teeth,” and although man perishes, “unconquered nature lives on” (IV, 77); the “abysmal Forces, untameable and immense” may crop out in man's “planted gardens” (J., Oct. 27, 1845).²⁵

Art mirrors through the “magic of language. … It is also the magic of impersonation, and not without its sinister aspect, the being possessed by spirits, or by the spirit” (P.F., p. 90). In “A Predecessor of Perseus,” Nemerov reveals the need for art as shield against the chaos of the other. Perseus used the mirror of Athena's shield against the Gorgon, but the “predecessor” of Perseus had no mirror. “Stravaging through the Dark Wood,” he rides forth on his quest, “and maybe he will keep on going / Until the grey unbearable she of the world / Shall raise her eyes, and recognize, and grin / At her eternal amateur's approach.” The predecessor, “All guts no glass,” will be “stricken in the likeness of himself.”²⁶

The limitation of the mirror of art is sorrowful. Like Emerson, who laments that “facts do not sit for their portrait … but lie in a web” (II, 334), Nemerov says, the “shapes” that “cannot be seen in a glass” are the ones “the heart breaks at” (“Holding the Mirror Up to Nature,” Mirrors and Windows [hereafter abbreviated as M.W.], p. 102):

They will never become valentines
or crucifixes, never. Night clouds
go on insanely as themselves
though metaphors would be prettier;
and when I see them massed at the edge
of the globe, neither weasel nor whale,
as though this world were, after all,
non-representational, I know
a truth that cannot be told, although
I try to tell you, “We are alone,
we know nothing, nothing, we shall die
frightened in our freedom.”

The world goes on being itself, and the moon, known by poets “to be Artemis,” sails away, beyond the serious poets with their “crazy ladies and cloudy histories.”

“The idea of the Other” is for Nemerov, as for Emerson and Jung, “a somewhat dangerous as well as tempting idea, magical, religious, superstitious, according to your point of view” (S.E., p. 401). In “The Scales of the Eyes,” eighteen poems which constitute the “variations” of the “text,” the quest to obtain the treasures of the unconscious becomes “a kind of spiritual exercise.” Through poetry, one attempts “to pray one's humanity back into the universe; and conversely … to read, to derive anew one's humanity from nature.”²⁷ The “text” is stated in the first poem of the series:

To fleece the Fleece from golden sheep,
Or prey, or get—is it not lewd
That we be eaten by our food
And slept by sleepers in our sleep?(28)

The poet preys on (prays to) the unconscious and is consumed by what he consumes (the unconscious determines him). The mind fleeces (steals from, preys) the Fleece (treasure, poem, reality) and reacts upon itself, so that the act of fleecing becomes synonymous with the result (Fleece). In poem VI, the poet finds that the world, “Already old when I began,” is “not my oyster, nor / No slow socratic pearl grows here.” Instead, like Emerson's boa constrictor, the world may close in on him: “The blind valves are closing / On only one grain of sand.” Poem VIII brings recognition: “There is / No place I do not taste again / When I choke back the deeper sleep / Beneath the mined world I walk.” The world of “mind” is dangerously “mined” with archetypes of the unconscious, which must be “mined” to obtain the “Fleece from golden sheep.”

III

The act of “mining” the unconscious is part of the process of creative activity, resulting in the work of art, the product. Jung says:

The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life.²⁹

The process of the active imagination, acting on passive, unconscious material, brings to light symbols of transformation. The symbol is the middle way between conscious and unconscious perception, having the quality of an image and being thus representable, but also pointing beyond itself to a “meaning that is darkly divined yet still beyond our grasp and [which] cannot be adequately expressed in the familiar words of our language. … It expresses not only a conception of the world … but also the way in which one views the world” (S.D., pp. 331, 336). The symbol not only “conveys a visualization of the process” but also “brings a re-experiencing of it, of that twilight which we can learn to understand only through inoffensive empathy, but which too much clarity only dispels.”³⁰ “Therefore,” Jung states, “this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter”; “Between the unknown essences of spirit and matter stands the reality of the psychic—psychic reality, the only reality we can experience immediately” (S.D., p. 384).

Similarly, Emerson frequently discusses the “inevitable dualism” which bisects nature (II, 97), saying that “only by taking a central position in the universe and living in its forms” (sinking to rise) can we know anything: “thoughts let us into realities” (VIII, 42, 272). Poets are the “standing transporters, whose employment consists of speaking to the Father and to matter” (VIII, 19); they are the “link” between “two craving parts of nature … the bridge over that yawning need, the mediator betwixt two else unmarriageable facts” (I, 207). The poet orders the world against chaos (X, 280); “the maker of a sentence … launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night” (J., Dec. 19, 1834). Although the marriage is always partial and sometimes contradictory, since “no sentence will hold the whole truth” (III, 245) and the world refuses “to be shut in a word” (J., Oct., 1841); nevertheless, a certain bi-polar unity is possible, with “fact” as “fulcrum” of spirit (XII, 59). By naming objects of nature, the “veil which hid all things” becomes “transparent” (XII, 89); thus, language is a “demi-god,” “material only on one side” (VII, 43).

Nemerov, too, notices a “growing consciousness of nature as responsive to language or, to put it the other way, of imagination as the agent of reality” (P.P., p. 241). The dilemma of the relation of self with non-self, through which “infinity becomes finite, essence becomes existence,” and spirit mingles with matter, is resolved by the “leap of likeness poetry shares with and derives from magic” (P.F., 102, 160). In “De Anima” Nemerov discusses the spirit's “ransacking through the earth / After its image, its being, its begetting.”

These pure divisions hurt us in some realm
Of parable beyond belief, beyond
The temporal mind. Why is it sorrowful?
Why do we want them together?

(The Next Room of the Dream [hereafter abbreviated as N.R.D.], p. 25)

The “link” that marries spirit and nature is vision culminating in language. The threshold (division, pain, limitation) of the eye is where the tapestry of art is woven:

There is a threshold, that meniscus where
The strider walks on drowning waters. …
                                                                                Now that threshold,
The water of the eye where the world walks
Delicately, is as a needle threaded
From the reel of a raveling stream, to stitch
Dissolving figures in a watered cloth,
A damask either-sided as the shroud
Of the lord of Ithaca, labored at in light,
Destroyed in darkness, while the spidery oars
Carry his keel across deep mysteries.

(New and Selected Poems [hereafter abbreviated as N.S.P.], “Runes,” p. 10)

Like Penelope, the poet weaves the fabric of art from the raveling stream of life. The damask's figures dissolve in a watered cloth, since, as Emerson has said, the “slippery Proteus is not so easily caught” (IV, 121). Meanwhile, the lord of Ithaca confronts the vast and brute sea with miniscule “spidery oars.”

In “The Master at a Mediterranean Port,” Nemerov calls the sea a “disputed field, it changes sides, / Is turbulent, is unreflecting, deep / And deep and deep.” Man constructs his “arcs / And angles,” but his curve remains fragmentary, for “yonder in white foam Poseidon rises.” The mirror of art is valuable, however, and not “altogether false,” but the “mastery” it establishes depends on “image,” “stance,” “way of seeing,” or, as Emerson says, the “angle of vision” (XII, 10). The poem ends with a plea that the “doubleness of these laws” be respected.³¹ Emerson, too, laments the “brute Fate” which may be “controlled by a law not adapted to man” (VIII, 407).

Both Emerson and Nemerov (like Jung) view poetry as uniting the me and the not-me through the psyche's participation in a creative process manifested by symbolic language. According to Emerson, the poet, “repairing to the fountain-head of all forms” (J., 1867; also II, 337), brings forth the “gift to men of new images and symbols … poetry which tastes the world and reports of it, upbuilding the world again in thought” (VIII, 64). The power is in the image, since it is through the image that the “world realizes mind,” and “better than images” is realized (VIII, 20). When the unconscious is tapped—“the whole art of man has been an art of excitation, to provoke, to extort speech from the drowsy genius” (XII, 69)—thought expands from a “barren thesis” and paints itself in symbols (XII, 71), symbols which are “fluxional … vehicular and transitive” (III, 34). The “incredible, inexplicable” poet, working to an “end above his will” by means which are “out of his will” (XII, 72), loses himself in his source (XII, 10). For Nemerov, symbolic language unites the me and the not-me in its mediation between thing and thought. He calls poetry a “species of askesis,” a devotion to the “energy passing between self and the world” (P.F., p. 131), and the energy is magically translated into language that can “act across distances and through an invisible medium.”³² The unconscious plays a large part in the process:

My belief about poetry says that you write a poem not to say what you think, nor even to find out what you think—though that is closer—but to find out what it thinks. … And what is that it thinks? … The devil, the goddess, the unconscious, the language?. … Some such notion as this might account not only for the poetic belief in the other, the outside, but also for the wellknown recalcitrance of lyric poetry to paraphrase, its oracular acceptance of ambiguity as the condition of life, and … the sheer excess vitality and valency of the text over all its explications.

(Reflexions on Poetry and Poetics [hereafter abbreviated as R.P.P.], pp. 160-161)

Emerson's metaphor of inspiration as a quick “flash of light” followed by darkness, “as if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see your hand” (VIII, 272), is echoed in Nemerov's poem “Winter Lightning,” where “A sky torn to the bone / Shattered the ghostly world with light”:

As if the storming sea
Should sunder to its floor,
And all things hidden there
Gleam in the moment silently,
So does the meadow at the door
To split and sudden air
                                                  Show stone and tree.

(N.S.P., p. 22)

“So may the poem dispart / The mirror from the light / Where none can see a seam.”³³ Language as mirror may reveal the world so that it seems seamless, but it is only a seeming; the world is an “as-if” world. Yet, the poet may “in the lightning second's sight, / Illuminate this dream / With a cold art” (N.S.P., pp. 72-73). “Lightning second's sight” suggests at least three qualities of the creative: instantaneousness, illumination, and magic.

Nemerov views the “poet as magician”

if we remember that magicians do not really solve the hero's problems, but only help him to confront these; as Merlin may be said to have helped Arthur, not so much by doing magic as by being for him a presence and a voice. … Our proper magic is the magic of language.

(P.F., p. 90)

Emerson's Merlin poems express his theory of the “mystic springs” of inspiration, where angels will say, “pass in, pass in [and] … mount to paradise / By the stairway of surprise!” But Merlin is a “master of the games,” not a problem solver. Through ritual, the “mighty line” will “reconcile” the “two married sides” of every mortal (IX, 120-124). In Emerson's terminology, the living, creating word produces “artful thunder”; in Nemerov's, it produces truth “triply wound,” the thing itself, the poet's perception, and language. In “The Book of Kells,” he writes: “Out of the living word / Come flower, serpent and bird.” “Kell,” a dialectal term for “caul,” the investing birth membrane, also means a net or web with which to capture or contain. Language is both creating word and capturing net. “In the river of the eye,” however, “speech is three-ply / And the truth triply wound” (S.G., pp. 81-83).

No thought can be conveyed but by symbols (J., 1867), writes Emerson, and the truth of the symbol is in its flowing, since “nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit” (II, 320). Since being is always becoming, the imagination must flow and not freeze (III, 35). Echoing Emerson, Nemerov begins the poem, “Painting a Mountain Stream,” with, “Running and standing still at once / is the whole truth,” and he ends it with, “Paint this rhythm, not this thing” (N.S.P., pp. 57-58). Emerson criticizes mystics who nail a “symbol to one sense” (III, 35), an idea repeated by Nemerov when he calls poetry and religion “the flowing and the static forms of the same substance” (P.F., pp. 12-13). Only the flowing has vitality and the symbol cannot be fully explicated. As Emerson says, a poem is more than “a vehicle to carry a sentence as a jewel is carried in its case”; it is “inseparable from its contents” (VIII, 54). Nemerov's metaphor for the impenetrability of the symbol is that its interpretation is only “the next room of the dream.” Ultimate, absolute truth is not measurable: Emerson states that “dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion” (III, 50), and Nemerov notes that the “connection” the poem makes may be merely a “solipsism from which we have no escape but by delusion into illusion” (S.E., pp. 400-401).

Emerson's poet puts the world “under the mind for verb and noun” (III, 20), whereas Nemerov's concentrates on the verb. In “The Loon's Cry,” the speaker of the poem, having fallen from “the symboled world, where I in earlier days / Found mysteries of meaning, form, and fate,” envies past ages when the world was ordered by Christian symbols. He sees that having “traded all those mysteries in” for reality in things, that reality has “exhausted all their truth.” As though answering his thought, a loon cries out, “Laughter of desolation on the river, / A savage cry,” and the poet feels naked and cold in his isolation until he realizes that to be otherwise is to be “in ignorance and emptiness” like Adam before the fall.

I thought I understood what that cry meant,
That its contempt was for the forms of things,
Their doctrines, which decayed—the nouns of stone
And adjectives of glass—not for the verb
Which surged in power properly eternal
Against the seawall of the solid world,
Battering and undermining what it built,
And whose respeaking was the poet's act.

For Nemerov, nouns are stone (Emerson's “rigid names” compared to the “wild fertility of Nature” [VII, 138]), and only verbs denoting process provide the material of the poet. Even though they undermine what they have built, still, it is only through them the poet can define

Both wretchedness and love. For signatures
In all things are, which leave us not alone
Even in the thought of death, and may by arts
Contemplative be found and named again.

(M.W., pp. 29-31)

Emerson's poet, “the symbolizer,” “projects a scribe's hand and writes the adequate genesis” (VIII, 71), whereas Nemerov's recognizes that the universe is unique to the person viewing it: “The universe induces / a different tremor in every hand. …” “Miraculous. It is as though the world / were a great writing” (“Writing,” M.W., p. 96). “The eye altering alters all” (VIII, 319), says Emerson, and Nemerov entitles a poem “For the Eye Altered Alters All”: “Number, said the skull Pythagoras, / Their transfixed eyes design the world.” Mathematical conceptions, “Abstracts of night … would not know / God and Son and guarding Ghost / Out of the writings of cold saints” (The Image and the Law [hereafter cited as I.L.], p. 24). The angle of vision determines the view.

Both poets refer to Plato's cave, Emerson, optimistically: “We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of … poetic forms” (III, 30). The “spirit,” the absolute behind Nature, “is a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us” (I, 61). More paradoxically, Nemerov phrases the dilemma in “Unscientific Postscript.”

There is the world, the dream, and the one law.
The wish, the wisdom, and things as they are.
Inside the cave the burning sunlight showed
A shade and forms between the light and shade,

“Neither real nor false nor subject to belief,” but as in life, “Reflexive, multiple.” The resolution to the dilemma is “not to believe … but fully as orchestra to accept, / Making an answer, even if lament, / In measured dance, with the whole instrument” (J.L., p. 69) a resolution accepted by Emerson as well.

From Nemerov's writings, one can postulate a contemporary theory of poetry: “The rational, conscious mind works on or through the irrational, unconscious mind to create a statement about the world. The world itself, independent of man, is knowable only through the imagination which conceives it in its moment of flowing and presents it in image, symbol, myth, magic, invocation. The experience, immediate, exalting, inspiring, and terrifying, cannot be translated into non-symbolic language. The truth of the poem is paradoxical; the bridge of language is true but its co-respondent reality may not be.” Emerson dotted many of these points on the fragmentary curve of his aesthetic theory. For all of his insistence upon his own poetic “hoarseness,” he was, as Howard Vincent has said, the “Radiant Center. And I mean center for his own day, for our day, for modern man—even, going way out, for the Consciousness III dreamers.”³⁴ The “early pulse” he contributed has expanded and radiated in spirals not only up and out but also in and down.

Notes

1. “Circles,” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-1904), II, 304. Subsequent references will be cited, volume and page, in the text.

2. “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism,” Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 7-8.

3. For instance, Harold Bloom has related Emerson to Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens; to A. R. Ammons; and to E. A. Robinson, Hart Crane, and Alvin Feinman in The Ringers in the Tower (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971) pp. 217-234; 257-322. The most extensive treatment of Emerson as “spokesman and as catalyst” in American poetry is Hyatt Waggoner's American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968).

4. Spires of Form: A Study of Emerson's Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951). Subsequent references will be cited in the text as Spires.

5. Howard Nemerov is a representative choice, having published (1947-1972) seven volumes of poetry, three novels, two collections of short stories, and two books of essays on poetry and fiction. He has edited and contributed to books on poetry. His bibliogrpahy of published works includes over 250 entires. He has taught at Hamilton, Bennington, and Brandeis colleges; he has been Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota, Poet in Residence at Hollins, and Hurst Professor of English at Washington University, St. Louis. He has also served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of of Congress. Nemerov states: “Poetry and criticism are as a double star, and … we shall do well to learn all we can of what poetry is, and try to see … how the art is constantly redefining itself. … And that includes doing not only criticism, but also theory” (Poetry and Fiction [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963], pp. vii-viii). Subsequent references to Poetry and Fiction will be cited in text as P.F.

6. Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Scribner's, 1949), pp. 283, 237.

7. “Emerson and the World of Dream,” Emerson's Relevance Today: A Symposium, ed. Eric Carlson, and J. L. Dameron (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1971), p. 66. Hopkins compares “Emerson's recognition of the suband ob-jective qualities of the phenomenon” to Freud's distinction between the id and the ego. She suggests, but does not develop, the idea that some of Emerson's dreams “illustrate Jung's theory of the ‘collective unconscious’” (p. 64). See also Gay Wilson Allen, “Emerson and the Unconscious,” American Transcendental Quarterly, 19 (Summer, 1973), 26-30.

8. C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (New York: Pantheon, 1959), p. 243. Subsequent references will be cited in the text as A.C.U.

9. Edward W. Emerson and Waldo E. Forbes, eds., The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909-1914), VI, 347 (Feb. 7, 1843). Subsequent references will be cited in the text as J.

10. C. G. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (New York: Pantheon, 1960), p. 133. Subsequent references will be cited in the text as S.D.

11. Journal of the Fictive Life (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963), pp. 146-147. Subsequent references cited in the text as J.F.L.

12. “Attentiveness and Obedience,” Poets on Poetry, ed. Howard Nemerov (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 241. Subsequent references cited in the text as P.P.

13. Robert Bly believes the poet must bring forward another reality from “inward experience,” “inward depth” (David Ossman, The Sullen Art [N.Y.: Citadel, 1963], p. 41). John Ciardi describes the “vital part of the poem” as being in the “unconscious mind” (Mid-Century American Poets [N.Y.: Twayne, 1950], p. xiv). John Wheellock calls the unconscious the “fourth Voice of Poetry,” speaking out of “some older, wiser Self in which all selves are included” (Poets of Today, II [N.Y.: Scribners, 1955], p. 3). Robert Duncan notes the “swell and ebb” of primal waters, “amoebic intelligences,” that “arouse in our awake minds a spell, so that we let our awareness go in the urgent wave of the verse.” See Poets on Poetry, p. 135.

14. The Salt Garden (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955), pp. 44-45. Subsequent references cited in the text as S.G.

15. In “Monadnoc” Emerson sees the “constant mountain” as a sanctuary which “imagest the stable good / For which we all our lifetime grope, / In shifting form the formless mind, / And though the substance us elude, / We in thee the shadow find” (IX, 74).

16. Richard Eberhart's seals “that rise and peer from elemental water” resemble Nemerov's trout. In “Seals, Terns, Time,” the poet is drawn by primordial forces from within and also by the mind, symbolized by the terns, whose “aspirations dip in mine.” The poet is “pondering, and balanced on the sea, / A gauze and spindrift of the world.” The unconscious is “hid,” and the conscious is “thwarted.” He is “pulled back in the mammal water, / Enticed to the release of the sky” (15 Modern American Poets, ed. George P. Elliott [N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1965], p. 34).

17. Mirrors and Windows (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 90-94. Subsequent references cited in the text as M.W.

18. One means of access to the unconscious that Emerson finds invalid is drugs. He understands that “bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandalwood and tobacco” as means to add “extraordinary power to their normal powers,” but, he says, “Nature will not be tricked, and inspiration owed to narcotics is ‘counterfeit excitement’” (III, 27-28). See also “Circles” (II, 322), in which he adds to this list “wild passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the heart.”

19. Hopkins, “Emerson and the World of Dreams,” p. 66. Professor Hopkins gives the source of this quote as the Ms. Lecture, “Demonology,” delivered February 21, 1839, at the Masonic Temple in Boston.

20. “Speculative Equations: Poems, Poets, Computers,” American Scholar, 36 (Summer, 1967), 399. Subsequent references will be cited in the text as S.E.

21. Cf. Peter Viereck who discusses three stages of spiritual truth: the lowest, that of the external world, has “nothing abiding”; the second, spiritual but willed, is “mere surface”; the third, “true inspiration,” cannot be kept by “imprisoning it or by mere daytime wisdom. It can be kept only by not trying to keep it, by not subjecting it to will” (Poet's Choice, ed. Paul Engle and Joseph Langland [New York: Dell, 1962], p. 156).

22. Poet's Choice, pp. 179-187. Subsequent references will be cited in the text as P.C.

23. Emerson's Sphinx says to man: “Thou art the unanswered question” (IX, 24).

24. Like Nemerov, Theodore Roethke sees the unconscious as a source of power, the womb of nature in its creative essence: “I believe that to go forward as a spiritual man it is necessary first to go back. … Sometimes one gets the feeling that not even the animals have been there before; but the marsh, the mire, the Void, is always there, immediate and terrifying” (Mid-Century American Poets, pp. 69-71). Muriel Rukeyser says that the process of writing poetry has much “unconscious work in it. … My own experience is that the work on a poem ‘surfaces’ several times, with new submergence after each rising. … Another deep dive to its own depth of sleep and waiting and you may be ready to write” (Waterlily Fire [New York: Doubleday, 1963], p. 11). Sylvia Plath in “The Ghost's Leavetaking” speaks of the “chilly no-man's land” of early morning when she is half asleep and the “waking head rubbishes out the draggled lot / Of sulphurous dreamscapes and obscure lunar conundrums / Which seemed, when dreamed, to mean so profoundly much.” The unconscious speaks “in sign language of a lost otherworld, / A world we lose by merely waking up” (The Colossus [New York: Knopf, 1962], pp. 39-40).

25. Theodore Holmes in “Idylls of Cape Ann” finds the exterior world as “what lies outside words.” Our descriptions are “just the shores on which it laps. … It is the loneliness we know because we live at the edge of it” (An Upland Pasture [Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1966], p. 12). Richard Eberhart, “The Horse Chestnut Tree,” finds that in the desire to steal a “shining amulet,” “we, outlaws on God's property, / Fling out imagination beyond the skies,” the death will “drive us from the scene / With the great flowering world unbroken yet” (15 Modern American Poets, pp. 33-34).

26. Nemerov, The Next Room of the Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 16. Subsequent references cited in the text as N.R.D.

27. Poets in Progress, ed. Edward Hungerford (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1962), p. 125.

28. New and Selected Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 117-131. Subsequent references cited in the text as N.S.P.

29. C. G. Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature (New York: Pantheon, 1966), p. 82.

30. C. G. Jung, Psychological Reflections, ed. by Jolande Jacobi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 44.

31. The Image and the Law (New York: Harper, 1947), p. 25. Subsequent references will be cited in the text as I.L.

32. Howard Nemerov, Reflexions on Poetry & Poetics (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972), p. 40. Subsequent references will be cited in the text as R.P.P.

33. Emerson notes that usually the “world will be whole and refuses to be disparted” (VII, 103).

34. Letter from Howard Vincent to Gloria Young, Ogunquit, Maine (June 27, 1973).