Three Visionary Poets

by Peter Davison

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Ay!—and what then?” Coleridge once asked. Keats likewise wrote of “Adam’s dream—he awoke to find it truth.” Many of our poets are visionaries in the dictionary sense: they employ “apparitions, prophecies, or revelations.” A poet’s private vision sets his unique aspirations at his unique obstacles: his poetry first erects the walls of his imprisonment and then contrives an avenue of escape

Poets in our time are not favored with visions of damsels with dulcimers or of Venus rising from the sea; rather, they tend to the apocalyptic. “The leaves were grey, as though chidden of God” (Hardy). “For Love has pitched his mansion in/The place of excrement” (Yeats). “I saw for a blazing moment /The great grassy world from both sides . . .” (James Dickey). “. . . an old bitch gone in the teeth ... a botched civilization” (Pound). These visions have been handed down to us by our poetic familiars. New poetry is often slower to move us. It takes time to accustom ourselves not only to a strange style of speaking but to an unfamiliar mode of envisioning the inner life

We have only recently become accustomed—if anyone can become “accustomed”—to Sylvia Plath’s Russianroulette fascination with death as a healer, her dizzying conviction that attempted suicide could clear the head. Yet, as her newly published earlier poems show, her vision did not clear till she had reached the very edge. In his poetry, James Wright is separated from his inner life by gravity: his body cannot aspire as his spirit does, and he envisions himself as a tree with fastened feet, or a bird, or an angel, engaged in a struggle to rise above mortality. Galway Kinnell, more consciously in search of a single vision than some of his contemporaries, comes to possess not Coleridge’s dream of Paradise, but his “Nightmare Life-in-Death.” The agon for this generation of poets (all three were born in the neighborhood of 1930) is coming to terms somehow with what cannot be borne. Poets ten or fifteen years younger, like James Tate or Diane Wakowski or William Matthews, have a different style of suffering excruciation and move with greater nonchalance in the presence of the absurd

Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares (Houghton Mifflin, $4.50 cloth, $2.95 paper) is a single long poem of 1400 lines which explicitly aspires to a single poetic vision. Its ten sections are interlinked in imagery. In this book, as in his earlier five, Kinnell writes as a man wandering by himself among mountains and cities, surfacing outside society. His vision takes the form of a succession of related nightmares, each of which brings together images of the present and the absent, the living and the dead: the yearning to embrace a distant daughter or lover, the cadaver of a hen full of unlaid eggs, a pair of secondhand shoes that seem to guide the new owner’s feet, a hotel bed that sags under the weight of vanished guests, a Vietnamese corpse that will not stop burning

Death and life interact over and over, both in the poem’s imagery and in its skeletal structure. Unlike most contemporary imagery, Kinnell’s is evenly balanced between indoors and outdoors, between the radiance of the sun and the gleam of the lamp. We can feel the muscles of the poem moving with the intensity of the poet’s visionary preoccupations as he asks his question:

and as he answers it:

Visions as radiant and rhapsodic as Kinnell’s have difficulty in confining themselves within the bounds of language. Though he seems at first to have sacrificed clarity in the search for sweep, my rereadings of the poem disclose an intricately managed structure which unfolds in clarity as well as in intensity. I am not sure its ending is altogether worthy of what has come before, partly because Kinnell’s hortatory style is better suited to rising incantation than to the dying fall, and I had a feeling at the end of having been thrown off while at full gallop. But it’s an impressive piece of work, and I would advise any serious student of contemporary poetry to make its acquaintance

Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963, and it may always be impossible to read her work without the shadow of that knowledge. Those harrowing last poems in Ariel are thrust at us out of the ruins of her life. Since the poems themselves are obsessed with suicide, there seems no way in this case to separate the poet’s biography (even though it is not yet written) from her work (even though it is not yet all published). The situation provides the perfect breeding ground for legend, for the cheapening of Sylvia Plath’s true and remarkable accomplishment, but her heirs, for whatever reason, have been publishing her posthumous work á la striptease, which helps the legend on its way. Crossing the Water (Harper & Row, $5.95) contains some, but not all, of the still-unpublished poetry. These thirty-four poems were written, the blurb tells us, “in the transitional period between The Colossus (1960) and Ariel.” Another collection, Winter Trees, is promised, but there is no sign yet of a Collected Poems. Crossing the Water gives us at least some notion of the route she took from the highly accomplished exercises of her first work to the unmistakable genius of her last

Lines like these, from “Stillborn,” look back to The Colossus:

The ear catches, as it is meant to, the studied effects of a phrase like “it’s a sad diagnosis,” or the flat ironic allusion to both pregnancy and idiocy in “bulged with concentration,” but the poem as a whole seems to me quite ordinary, the lament of a literary lady clucking over the dryness of her work. Other expert, crowded, rather pointless poems sound even more frustrated, as though their author were trying to lift a stone while standing on it. Not until we take a look forward to her later work can we discover why

The poems in Ariel seem to be stimulated by some ghastly conviction that life can be bought only by the near presence of death, but Crossing the Water has not arrived at so advanced a position. The poems teem strangely, however, with hospitals, nurses, stillbirths, operations: “. . . a terror/Of being wheeled off under crosses and a rain of pietas.” “The nauseous vault/Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.” “Over one bed in the ward, a small blue light/Announces a new soul.” Life is throughout threatened by lifelessness; birth is interlaced with death; the heart is menaced by the cold blindness of stone. “Love Letter” is typically scattered with stones throughout

Not so much of a gift as all that, if you leap forward to “Lady Lazarus,” perhaps the most heartbreaking poem in Ariel, and listen to how remarkably the tone has altered:

To return to Crossing the Water, only in a few poems—like “The Tour”—do we begin to encounter that acid contempt for the body, that carelessness about life itself, those clipped monosyllables, that scorching fury which can be overheard in the last recordings of Sylvia Plath’s voice. It was the voice of someone possessed by a vision:

How frighteningly those “wiggly fingers” bring together the writer-typist and the nurse-midwife; and how that bald, blind, “awfully nice,” inexpensive creature manages to embody the conflicting forces of life and death. Was Sylvia Plath in search of a larger vision that would include both?

Crossing the Water did not find it. The collection discloses a world of stone and blazing light, inhabited by a whole population of these blind people. The poems repeatedly contrast the warmness of the heart with the coldness and blindness of the eye

There are many more images connecting the eye that sees but cannot understand with the heart that beats and cannot feel. Childbirth and childrearing seem to make no difference to this inner alienation; neither does love, for the heart cannot comprehend it. When the poems reach back through memory toward the poet’s childhood, they still encounter the same parched and glittering landscape, the same abyss between the heart and the eye

Ariel would take Sylvia Plath up from this desert of death into the wild country at the edge of life. By then, exalted and exultant, she would no longer be separated from her vision, for the heart and the eye would have learned by some desperate stratagem to see as one:

The last poetry exudes an actual sense of relief in having drawn such blood from stones, as though no price could have been too high to pay to irrigate the parched soil

Yet the poet’s irony never failed her, even at the end. The next lines of “Edge” read:

Her death was, like almost all suicides, unnecessary. It is reasonable to think that Sylvia Plath might have agreed, had she survived her last “accident.” There was no more need for her death to take place than there was a need for the visions in Crossing the Water to set her eye and her heart at loggerheads. It is both sentimental and ghoulish to applaud her self-sacrifice in “going all the way,” for her death blithely brutalized a number of other people’s lives; yet her dedication as an artist was as total as her humanity was defective

The visions that arise in James Wright’s Collected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, $7.95) are more Coleridgean than nightmarish. They have a way of rising out of their imagery on wings. The world for him is seen as neither a barren desert nor a solitary pilgrimage, but a familiar garden of earthly delights. His poems are full of farm animals, scarecrows, owls, grass, and trees whose tops reach up though their roots are fastened to the planet. He holds his being at the edge between earth and air. The barrier between the two is the force of gravity. The poet is seeking grace to overcome gravity’s inhibitions

A vision need not be forced out of irreconcilable opposites. Though there be anguish in the human condition, Wright’s anguish is envisioned merely as a part of the way things are, or even as a path to what is coming:

Wright’s poems settle on symbols that lie sleeping in the grass of his Midwestern landscape—sights that may turn into insights, visibilities that may turn into visions if only they can be freed from their mortal limitations. He will have none of Kinnell’s paradoxical nightmares, none of Sylvia Plath’s murderous reconciliation of opposed forces. His is a simpler vision, one of heaviness and lightness, of rising and falling

Wright unites the vision with the visionary so that what the poet sees rises naturally from what he is. The art is one of making the difficult look easy. He is not concerned to squeeze blood from stones or impose the ravenous imperatives of his struggle for sanity on the processes of growing up and dying down. It is as much a part of his vision to aspire to rise as to fail and fall

Death stands in a natural relation to life, without needing to be rammed into the same bed with it: death is simply the last failure to rise above the animal condition, whether by force of accident or through ordinary mortality:

Wright does not seek to call attention to the strenuousness of his effort to comprehend, or to shout, “Look at me!” It is enough for him to steal glimpses of visions as they emerge, to catch them by surprise. Thus he induces us to see things the way he does, to look at nature afresh, to find traces of our own features in the portraits of ordinary people. If at his weakest his manner is so ordinary as to be altogether unremarkable, at his strongest he can remind us of what we have always known but never noticed and reassure us that we have been there before. His visions do not need to transport us to a new country, like Sylvia Plath’s. They renew the old country for us. Wright’s is a pastoral vision, if you like. Still, mortality looms so large in it that smugness finds no entrance; and unlike most contemporary poetry, it leaves us room for love—as in his superb translation of Apollinaire’s “The Pretty Redhead,” where we find the lines:

Weave a circle round him thrice