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Deep Image
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by Leslie Ullman
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Deep Image |
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by Leslie Ullman |
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The Deep Image movement, although it arose somewhat in response to the spirit of the decade, nevertheless came about largely through the singular energy of Robert Bly, who promoted it as an antidote to Modernist aesthetics. His and William Duffy's magazine the Fifties, which began in 1958 and soon became the Sixties, flourished throughout the decade as the showcase for writers they felt would steer contemporary American poetry in the direction it needed to go: inward, toward the under explored regions of the psyche, by means of startling but rightly intuited images. The magazine also provided Bly with an arena for the impassioned, reductive, enormously provocative literary criticism for which be has become famous, a criticism that ranks intuition over rationalism and imagery over discourse , as a means of penetrating, for a moment, the reader's unconscious. If Bly's sense of mission inspired him to dismiss things like Shakespeare and the entire formal English tradition with an overly theatrical sweep of the pen, it also made him recognize and offer to the public a new breed of North American poet for whom images were a mode of thought rather than skillfully crafted decoration. Some of these writers were James Wright, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, David Ignatow, Donald Hall, William Stafford, and Louis Simpson. He also produced and published translations of European and Latin American poets whosework, more than any other single factor, startled a younger generation of poets into recognizing the general direction they wanted to take. Especially influential were Bly's translations of German writers Gottfried and Georg Trald, Spanish writers Federico Garcia Lorca and Antonio Machado, Peruvian writer Cesar Vallejo, Chilean writer Pablo Neruda, French writers Rene Char and Paul t, luard, and numerous other nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets from Norway, Latin America, and other parts of Europe. All of these, Bly maintained, bad "passed through surrealism" and as a result spoke from that fecund area of the subconscious, or collective unconscious, where spirituality resides. This spirituality, as Bly demonstrated both in his criticism and his own poetry, derives its force from the natural world, from silence and solitude, and equips the writer to surface and fully confront the complexities of modern life. Like Olson and the Projectivists, Bly sought to explore the self in an area beyond that of ego, in an area that might offer "organic" truth of its own. 15 Whereas Olson mapped this territory using the body as a point of departure, Bly mapped it Via the psyche, using ground broken by Freud and Jung to highlight the associative powers of the mind as it responds to resonant imagery and opens the self to depths that must be acknowledged despite the pressures from the culture and self-protective aspects of self to avoid them. Olson, he felt, stopped too short, treating the image simply as literal object. Yet much of tile poetry produced in the sixties by Olson's adherents, especially that of Levertov, Snyder, and Crecley, did explore and reveal new depths of interaction between the self and the physical world, did address itself to nature and to perception in resonant ways, and Bly recognized this achievement by publishing and discussing at length their poetry in The Sixties. Indeed, another of the mail), repercussions of Bly's energetic revamping of the poetic imagination in America was the melting of boundaries between these two important movements, one of which was legitimate]), avant-garde in the fifties and one of which seemed an inevitable condensation of energies burgeoning anyway, throughout the culture, in the sixties. Ultimately, the two movements became even more closely aligned as the), provided the major impetus to another unique and vital phenomenon in poetry of tile sixties, the poetry of protest. By tile time the Vietnam War bad firmly entrenched itself in the national consciousness as morally untenable and out of control, both Bly and Levertov had forged, in their poetry and critical writings, links between inwardness and the outer world, the explorable self and the collective self, which legitimized "protest" as a necessary aesthetic in its own right and drew poets from diverse areas into its field of energy. From “Deep Imagists: The Subconscious as Medium” by Leslie Ullman at http://www.colby.edu/personal/i/isadoff/cap/Ullman.doc Another comprehensive look at the Deep Image movement is available at http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/gs/1.2/bushell.html |