A Pattern of Visionary Imagery in W. S. Merwin :: Poem Poet Essays

A Pattern of Visionary Imagery in W. S. MerwinAfter quoting Blakes own words to point his work as fundamentally Visionary, and then defining that term as the view of the world . . . as it really is when it is seen by human consciousness at its greatest apex and intensity (143), Northrop Frye suggests an important but largely ignored point for literary criticism in his essay Blake After Two Centuries when he observes that whole kit and caboodle deal Aldous Huxleys The Doors of Perception seem to show that the formal principles of this heightened vision ar evermore latent in the mind, and that it is this constant availability of vision, near at hit but suppressed, which perhaps explains the communicability of such visions (143). Frye is right, of course, but there is another actor for his observations importance to criticism, which is that the substitution classry and perceptions of visionary experiences, whatever their cause, occur in readily identifiable clusters, the affe ctive nature of which is determined largely by the worked up response of the person experiencing them. Because of this, and because there are poets and authors other than Blake whose work is too visionary--that is, concerned to a large extent with the imagery and perceptions of what we now inflict altered states of consciousness-- star can construct from various works and research on these states a visionary schema that will indicate not scarce when such a writers subject is the unconscious, but whether his or her emotional reaction to it is positive, negative, or some ambivalent combination of the two. By means of such a schema, for example, it is possible to trace through W. S. Merwins deep image song a pattern of reconciliation with the unconscious to argue that, in the works published from 1962 through 1977, he moves from a generally negative signified of it to a far more positive one. Though individual poems in the collections ranging from The Moving Target to The Compass Flower reflect varying senses of the unconscious--there are quietly happy poems in his darkest collection The Lice, for instance--the general pattern in these books and those published between is one of a coming-to-terms with the unconscious, a movement unmistakable largely as a coming-to-terms with goal. Before arguing that this acceptance of death is no less than a willing (rather than a fearful) acceptance of the self-surrender prerequisite to any visionary experience or altered state, even one as specialized as the successful writing of deep image poetry, it is first necessary both to provide the general outlines of that schema mentioned above, and to establish that Merwins work, like Blakes, is in fact visionary.