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Intimate but Not Private: Deep Image and the Telluric Sublime in W. S. Merwin’s Poems

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Zazula P.

Academic Journal of Modern Philology

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2016

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vol. 5

181-189

EN

If we define a poet’s encounter with the sublime as an inherently religious experience, then many of W. S. Merwin’s poems can be considered as deeply religious. At its best, his poetry has an air of uncanny familiarity, a “familiar strangeness,” as one critic has put it. In this sense Merwin’s lyrics offer a modified approach to the concept of the sublime. Blending archetypal imagery with defamiliarized diction, the American poet tries to reconnect his readers with a long-gone religious paradigm – that of earth-oriented, pagan spirituality of Western Europe, filtered, though, through Merwin’s essentially Buddhist sensibility. Offering a close-reading analysis of selected poems (with an emphasis on Merwin’s use of what Robert Bly calls the deep image), this paper attempts to decode some of their more complex metaphorical meanings in the light of the poet’s spiritual affinities. These, though theologically unspecified, seem grounded in his both “pagan” and poignant awareness of nature’s self-contained status vis-á-vis the human condition. Thus, both Nature’s ultimate ontological status and Merwin’s private creed remain a riddle.

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Neoarystoteliczna wizja natury ludzkiej w ekopoezji i eseistyce Gary’ego Snydera

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Zazula P.

Academic Journal of Modern Philology

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2014

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vol. 3

137-156

EN

Close-reading selected poems and essays by Gary Snyder, the article examines an apparent epistemological contradiction in Snyder’s environmentalist message. As a rule Snyder consistently relies on essentialist discourse, with his frequent references to human nature, the collective unconscious, mankind’s generic identity and man’s inner voice. In the poem The Call of the Wild, however, he questions man’s ability to retrieve a “natural” generic core through, say, meditation or vision quests. This apparent contradiction is resolved when one views Snyder’s work through the lens of Neo-Aristotelian thought as exemplified by Terry Eagleton’s concept of human nature. To Eagleton, like to Aristotle, human nature is not a static biological given, but rather a mental predisposition. Thus it is more of a task, or challenge, than a set of characteristics. Such ideas resonate with Snyder’s concept of the ever-changing human nature. However, Eagleton and Snyder pass company as fellow Neo-Aristotelians when it comes to the socio-political applications of their ideas. To the British critic, socialism is the answer, allegedly providing the optimal conditions for a harmonious blend of one’s private and public self. To Snyder, state-supported socialism is but another oppressive political system, very much in the mentally-restrictive tradition of what he calls “the Judaeo-Capitalist-Christian-Marxist West.”

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A Gnostic in the Garden: Myth and Religion in Louise Glück’s Poems

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Zazula P.

Academic Journal of Modern Philology

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2020

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vol. 10

255-268

EN

Louise Glück repeatedly refers to the Bible and classical mythology, even when writing about poignantly personal issues. Far from being mere high-brow literary embellishments, these cultural quotes and intertextual analogs testify to Glück’s consistent attempt to transcend the traditionally personalist scope of lyric poetry. Such a resolutely transpersonal perspective is particularly discernible in her poems dealing with broadly-conceived religious themes, especially that of cultivating the postlapsarian, modern analog of the Biblical Garden of Eden. In A Village Life(2009), for example, the ontological possibility of transcendence is alternately hinted at and questioned, with the poet inhabiting a transition zone between doubt and faith as a questioning believer, so to speak. In the much-earlier The Wild Iris (1992), the axiological status of God is explored in highly unorthodox ways, the poems’ speakers undermining many established images of God in Christian and Jewish traditions. Arguably, what the two volumes share is their Gnostic imagery, purposely veiled in A Village Life and more explicit in The Wild Iris. Already present in Firstborn (1968), Gnostic undertones can also be found in other volumes, e.g. The House on Marshland (1975) and Descending Figure (1980). Iconoclastic and transgressive, Glück’s poems often expose a destructive facet of transcendence or feature some kind of charge against God, explicit or implicit. The Creator for the most part remains irritatingly silent, with the poet constantly bringing this up—sometimes in a tongue-in-cheek, sometimes in a deadly serious manner. A virtuoso of register shifts, Louise Glück plays cat and mouse with the reader, evading any closures. Her personal creed remains a riddle.

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Intimate but Not Private: Deep Image and the Telluric Sublime in W. S. Merwin’s Poems

Neoarystoteliczna wizja natury ludzkiej w ekopoezji i eseistyce Gary’ego Snydera

A Gnostic in the Garden: Myth and Religion in Louise Glück’s Poems