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 establish his work as essentially Visionary, and then defining that term as the view of the world . . . as it really is when it is seen by mankind consciousness at its greatest height and intensity (143), Northrop Frye suggests an important but largely ignored point for criticism in his essay Blake After twain Centuries when he observes that works like Aldous Huxleys The Doors of Perception seem to show that the formal principles of this heightened vision are constantly latent in the mind, and that it is this constant availability of vision, unspoilt at hand but suppressed, which perhaps explains the communicability of such visions (143). Frye is right, of course, but there is another reason for his observations importance to criticism, which is that the imagery and perceptions of visionary experiences, whatever their cause, occur in readily identifiable clusters, the affective nature of which is det ermined largely by the emotional reaction of the person experiencing them. Because of this, and because there are poets and authors other than Blake whose work is also visionary--that is, concerned to a large extent with the imagery and perceptions of what we now call altered states of consciousness-- single can construct from various works and research on these states a visionary schema that will indicate not only when such a writers subject is the unconscious, but whether his or her emotional reaction to it is corroborative, negative, or some(prenominal) ambivalent combination of the two. By means of such a schema, for example, it is possible to trace through W. S. Merwins deep image poetry a pattern of propitiation with the unconscious to argue that, in the works published from 1962 through 1977, he moves from a ecumenicly negative sense of it to a far more positive one. Though individual poems in the collections ranging from The Moving Target to The Compass Flower reflect v arying 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 visible largely as a coming-to-terms with death. Before arguing that this toleration of death is no less than a willing (rather than a fearful) acceptance of the self-surrender necessary 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.