From Dr. Kevin Lewis, Dept. of Religious Studies, USC

2007-08-16T14:41:00.000-07:00

"REELING AND STAGGERING": THE ECSTATIC MOMENT IN THE POETRY OF JAMES DICKEY

Kevin Lewis, Dept. of Religious Studies, USC
kevin@sc.edu
803-777-2561

The poetry of James Dickey has yet to be taken as seriously as I believe it is destined to be in the years to come. There are, of course, other possible explanations for the neglect Dickey has suffered from critics on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean whom he admired but who seem to have avoided discussing his poetry. I will suggest two possible explanations and then offer a broader, historical-cultural perspective from which to view the achievement of this remarkable and readable poet.
First, I note that too many of our critics seem generally discomfited by use for serious purposes of concrete religious imagery. Not all but many of Dickey's poems (many of them among his most successful) make use of or allude to the rhetoric of the evangelical Protestantism of the "Bible Belt," the native language of his local biblical culture. Although Dickey confines the use of this rhetoric and imagery within poetic contexts where the richness of its symbolism can be exploited for complicated effects, his very use of it seems to have put off readers and critics reflexively alarmed by the mere appearance of traditional religious language. At the very least, Dickey's use of religious imagery has been regarded as but another instance of the poet's characteristic attraction to merely bizarre, even absurd subject matter—the sorry strategy, so the case against him goes, of a poet either cynical about his audience or lacking in modernized subtlety and sophistication. This familiar attitude of cultured condescension to religion is deeply entrenched in the modern world; it takes many forms, and not only critics of poetry number among the many for whom religion is an embarrassment.
More interesting and more easily correctible is the perhaps understandable reluctance of critics to place Dickey's poetry within the larger context of American cultural history. Understandable, because Dickey worked hard to achieve an original voice divested of the echoes of previous or other contemporary poets, as he tried to restore to the lyric the highly charged emotionalism, and what he called the "muscular sensibility" and the story-telling element he considered it to have lost. But a critical missed chance nonetheless.
This is my second point and the one I will address here: when placed against a background of ideas and themes usually considered the province of the history of ideas and of culture, we will better discern and appreciate the kind of imagination at work in Dickey's poetry. We may hear echoes of voices pitched to reflect pre-Enlightenment Puritan, and subsequent Great Revival and Transcendentalist experiences of religious vision: a family of resemblances.
To narrow the focus, I will confine my observations to a certain kind of experience to which he has returned often in his poetry. I mean Dickey's imagination of the ecstatic moment of the visionary transported through immersion in nature, of hierophanies produced when man and nature meet. But let him phrase it, as he does inimitably in the “The Sun. the Cave, and the Burning Bush” chapter in Sorties, where he describe what he takes to be “the whole magnificent potential of poetry,” that it should “bring the reader to the place where the flame breaks from the pit and the gods speak from the burning bush, lifting human words from their mereness, out of the range of teachable amenities and into the realm of salvation, redemption and rebirth” (Sorties, 166). Specific poems in which we encounter visions of a higher order of reality, as given to the poet (or his speaker) through nature, include the early "Trees and Cattle, '' ''Springer Mountain," "For the Nightly Ascent of the Hunter Orion Over a Forest Clearing," "Drinking from a Helmet," and the more recent "The Lord in the Air." But the best example is the poem he called the most complicated, far-fetched poem he had written: the poem "Approaching Prayer," written in the early 'sixties.
The speaker in a Dickey poem who experiences access to another order of reality at a moment of rapt immersion in nature or in the life process is apt to approach something analogous to mystical knowledge of, perhaps even union with the divine source of the life process. In "Approaching Prayer," the remembered killing of a boar, with bow and arrow, produces such a "peak" moment. Having successfully immersed himself, by total, pains-taking participation, in the created order, the boar-hunter at the instant of the kill felt perfectly caught up in the cosmic order, wherein, as he recalls the sensation, "The planets attune all their orbits." The speaker of the poem is the hunter, years later, trying to pray a valid prayer on the occasion of his father's death. The imagination of this son and hunter, responding to self-imposed stress, then goes to work.
He arranges on a chair in the attic of his father’s empty house his father’s gray sweater, gamecock spurs, and the head of a boar he had once helped his father kill: props for a makeshift prayer tower. He dons the sweater, straps on the spurs, and places the “hollow hog’s head” over his own head, becoming one with the boar remembered at bay and then expiring in creek water at the site of the kill. He speaks for the boar (in italics) and, alternatively, for himself “inside the hair helmet.” The memory of that "best moment" (the kill), summoned and relived within the poem, as it gives way to a trance-like identification with the dying boar, enables the speaker to liberate himself from the rational mind, to "slay reason," to see," then to "see nothing," and, in the dark of the senses overcome by a higher need–remember here the via negativa of the classical mystics–to prove worthy of visitation by the divinity, by grace. "Something goes through me…Like the explosion of a star," he says: "It picks up speed and my heart pounds." He is granted a vision of the boar's (or perhaps his own) apotheosis, its blood "sailing through rivers/ Bearing the living image" of his total stillness at the moment of the kill. The cosmic light goes through him and gives out instantaneously. And, as it does, the dried blood on the gamecock spurs he has fastened on his own heels seems to freshen, indicating perhaps the death wounding of the old man of his creature-hood. Either that "Or flight," he says; "I nearly lift from the floor," where he is kneeling.
An analogy with the experience of the classical mystics is possible: the path of preparation, illumination, the "dark night," and, finally, union. I would add that Dickey, at least in this poem, seems to me one with those mystics especially who will not be satisfied until, through becoming one with God, they become God. The illuminated speaker in such a Dickey poem personifies a hankering for divinization, for a piece of the glory seat. How much of this hankering merely exploits the exaggerated rhetoric of "Bible Belt" religion, and how much genuinely expresses the dilated ego of the crusading poet, I do not know. But it is there. And I, for one, admit to being moved by Dickey's poetic flights of craving for a taste of heaven, his imaginings of illuminated transport, as it were, out of the body.
Consider another religious analogy for this kind of imagination. Dickey's vision of nature, at its most intense and most affecting, is an ecstatic vision, overcome by which the speaker in his poetry enters something like the state of mind claimed by the writer of the book of Revelation: the privileged perception of one caught up "in the spirit" (Rev. 1:10) The comparison is carefully chosen. The speaker of "Approaching Prayer," is conducted, as perhaps only Dickey among contemporary poets can do it–perhaps an effect of what he calls his "country surrealism"– into modern poetry's best approximation of divinely inspired transport, that notoriously "other" way of seeing. (This is an effect which, arguably, perhaps only a poet brought up in or in touch with a latter-day biblical culture is entitled or even able to achieve.) In certain up-country churches along the Blue Ridge Mountains, certain of Dickey's regional compatriots enter into this charismatic state in order to handle snakes. The speakers in Dickey's religious poems enter it to encounter risks of a different order: to reconnoiter in the no-man's land extending beyond the knowable where the deepest mysteries of the self verge upon, in his words, the God who "is so much more than God" (Self-Interviews, 78).
He is well aware that such a poetry takes risks. "As Longinus points out," he writes, "there's a razor's edge between sublimity and absurdity. And that's the edge I try to walk… You have to risk people saying, 'That's the silliest goddam thing I ever read!' But I don't think you can get to sublimity without courting the ridiculous." To those who object to his poetry on grounds that he seems to dwell compulsively or perhaps cynically upon the bizarre or the sensational, he retorts: my poems "are meant to seem far-fetched. My only regret is that I didn't make them more far-fetched than I did" (Self-Interviews, 65ff.).
But, turning now to the background which the history of ideas and of culture can supply us, I want to suggest a way to grasp more sure1y than by these analogies the nature and meaning of the religious dimension in Dickey’s poetry. The interest in doing so is compelled no less by the poetry itself than by the man who, while given to contradictory assertions about his relation to the Christian faith, in an observation more lucid than usual admits that "the religious sense seems to me very strong in my work in some weird kind of way" (Se1f-Interviews, 79; italics mine), and who has announced "It seems to me that I am the bearer of some kind of immortal message to humankind" (Sorties, 54): he is a prophet!
One focus of intellectual and cultural history is the basic continuity of experience which underlies the successive articulation of "ideas" and expressions of the creative imagination in a culture. Ideas and visions generate and transmit cultures visibly. But underneath or behind evolves the life of certain deposited habitual perceptions and dispositions, out of which ideas and visions stir. This is the heart-beat of a culture: those underlying continuities of experience which inform its particular genius. I mean, by stating this as fact, to acknowledge the influence that the great Puritan scholar Perry Miller continues to exert on my understanding of the key roles played by the mind and the imagination in shaping history. In this understanding, evidence of the existence of these continuities is to be sought in the works of writers and artists attracted to those persistent themes which, though they may fade from view, reemerge repeatedly in altering forms as a culture evolves.
What I suggest is that we notice in Dickey's ecstatic vision of nature the re-appearance of a theme Perry Miller has daringly traced in American writers of earlier generations, products of a regional tradition, that of New England, so obviously different in many respects from the Southern tradition which Dickey has made a point of claiming. I respect Dickey as an uneven but nevertheless pure poet through whom a portion of the genius of our culture speaks. I see in Dickey the poet what Miller observes in a certain kind of Puritan and in the Transcendentalists—Miller calls it a drive "to learn how, and how most ecstatically, he can hold any sort of communion with the environing wilderness." This I draw from the Foreword to the essay "From Edwards to Emerson," (in the volume Errand Into the Wilderness) in which Miller characterizes a common mystical and pantheistic view of nature linking the cultures of the Puritans and the Transcendentalists. Though not everywhere accepted or valued by those better versed in the literatures of the Puritans and the Transcendentalists than I, Miller's thesis in this small tour de force of American intellectual history evokes a background that can illuminate Dickey's poetry.
Using Jonathan Edwards as his main exhibit, Miller traces in the Puritan tradition of New England a strain of emotional response to the natural Creation viewed sacramentally as the dwelling place of the Creator God with whom the regenerate Calvinist was to forge a relationship unmediated by text or teaching. But at the same time, the worldly caution and social conservatism of the Puritan theocracy ensured suspicion of the individualism and religious freedom implied in such a response. To the pharisaic Puritan, God must always be respected as qualitatively Other than the world upon which he sits in judgment. Duty bade him oppose mysticism and pantheism in whatever form it might take, as it bade him oppose Antinomianism. But, as Miller wants us to see, Puritan theology contains within itself the invitation to this threatening, politically subversive path. The Puritan fathers had good cause to be apprehensive lest an Anne Hutchinson or the Quakers arise in their midst. For if God imparts wisdom directly to the regenerate soul, then it follows, from adherence to the doctrines of divine Creation and providence, that God imminent in a good Creation may directly inspire the soul eager for an unmediated experience of divinity. Defenders of orthodoxy in New England were plagued more than we have been led to believe, Miller argues, by what he calls the "reeling and staggering" (191f, 203) of everyday "infidels" bent on pursuing a personal approach to God through nature. As he puts it, "One side of the Puritan nature hungered for these excitements," while the other side (with which we are all too familiar) adhered to "an ideal of social conformity, of law and order, of regulation and control" (192).
The Calvinist premise upon which Jonathan Edwards allowed himself to court the risk of heresy, though not beyond a point checked by adherence to the doctrine of divine transcendence, can be simplified in the proposition that God created the world for the pure joy of self-expression, that, in his sublime perfection, He is perfectly admirable, perfectly lovable. The perfection of his Creation supplies to the regenerate spirit an overwhelming incentive to conform to the First Article of the Westminster Shorter Catechism approved in 1648 for the Reform (Calvinist) Churches of Scotland England, and Ireland, namely, that “the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever” One has only to turn to the autobiographical Personal Narrative to discover in Edwards a capacity for ecstatic nature mysticism, a capacity encouraged and intensified, we might add, as he tells it, by solitary meditation out-of-doors on the love poetry of the Song of Songs.
And, of course, Edwards’s near contemporary, Edward Taylor, in the devotional poetry of the Preparatory Meditations (First and Second Series, 1682-1725) comes to mind as a strong precursor. “Meditation 1” (“What Love is this of thine …”) and “Meditation 8” (“I kening through Astronomy Divine …”) well illustrate his characteristically “glorying” use of language. But the last stanza of “An Address to the Soul Occasioned by Rain” is especially notable:

Shall I be made
A Sparkling Wildfire Shop
Where my dull Spirits at the Fireball trade
Do frisk and hop?
And while the Hammer doth the Anvill pay
The fire ball matter sparkles ev’ry way.

Now, while to appreciate the American tradition as a whole one must constantly heed the survival and influence within it of the Puritan mind, one admits the obvious: the Southern regional tradition, by virtue of its different origins, boasts its own integrity -- and more distinctive, distinguishing features than I can mention here. But we do need to remark one particular distinction drawn by Sacvan Bercovitch, a more recent commentator on the literature of the Puritans (in The Puritan Origins of the American Self), between the Northern and Southern visions of nature generally. This discrimination will, I hope, throw light on the nature of Dickey's disassociation of himself from the immediately preceding "mainstream" Southern literary tradition, and, hence, on the appropriateness of linking him with this other regional tradition.
Bercovitch contrasts the prevailing Puritan millenarianism with the utopianism of the southern colonies by contrasting their respective attitudes toward the virgin land of the New World. Where "the Puritans, with apocalyptic urgency, considered America the setting for the last act in the cosmic drama of salvation, the Southern colonists built a utopian myth in which," observes Bercovitch, "mingled the euphoria of Renaissance exploration with the secular aspirations of classical and medieval Europe" (p. 137) They personified the New World as both nourishing mother and undefiled virgin, offering material plenty and ravishment of the senses. Bercovitch quotes Richard Hakluyt and other travelogue-writers to the effect that this nubile and seductive New World, this "Naked Nature," lay ripe for the taking (a theme that will not be lost on readers of Dickey's "The Sheep Child," which imagines a “chaste ewe in the wind” subject to “Farm boys wild to couple /With anything”). This Southern myth of an unspoiled paradise was expressed in imagery quite as erotic, at times, as that of the Puritans expressing communion with the Divine, though it lacked the spiritual and eschatological meaning with which Puritan rhetoric was charged.
This Southern dream of utopia, Bercovitch observes, fed (or trickled down) into the myth of the Old South which, of course, we encounter among the generation preceding Dickey's in the writings of the Agrarians, in the ideal of classical order and balance, and of cultured religious orthodoxy upheld in the poetry and prose, for example, of Ransom and Tate. But it is this late-coming tradition -- was it ever mainstream? -- in the interpretations the Agrarians and the Fugitives have given it, from which Dickey as a different kind of traditional Southerner effectively disassociated himself.
After World War II, Dickey did spend five formative years at Vanderbilt University discovering the main lines along which he was to develop as a poet who did wish to draw upon his roots in a Southern culture. At Vanderbilt he was influenced by Donald Davidson's advocacy of regionalism and cultural pluralism as in The Attack on Leviathan. But, at the same time, as an apprentice poet searching for a voice, he found more with which to identify in Randall Jarrell, and in what he describes as the "craziness" of Kenneth Patchen, and in the body-awareness of the now obscure George Barker (and, of course, later in Hart Crane and Theodore Roethke). The mode of the Southern Gentleman was not for him. He had come from a northern suburb of Atlanta into a world at war, flown for the Air Force in the Pacific, and entered college at twenty-three on the G.I. Bill, and “had no connection with the cultivated and cultured agrarian southern gentleman types, the Davisons and the Ransoms. My background is completely different from them…. I am strictly a suburbanite … a [Southern] city fellow” (The State newspaper, August 28, 1977). He never wanted to live, as the saying goes, “on the land.”
At Vanderbilt University, in part with the encouragement of Monroe K. Spears, he discovered the single most important principle of the poetic creed he consolidated, modified, and developed over the intervening years. What set him apart from the aristocratic tradition of the Agrarians, he realized then, was not only a need to write more out of his emotions, but a strong desire to release the visionary within. Whether conscious of it or not, in this he was identifying, I think, with that white Southern culture profoundly -- without acknowledging it -- influenced over many generations by spirit-filled, African-American religion. He framed that allegiance, disguised, through Picasso: Art is a lie that helps us know the truth. He repeats this proposition over and over in his prose writings. And his business as a poet, even, or rather especially when he writes about the creatures, landscapes, and the processes of the natural world, he conceived to be that of conjuring up the fabulous, the miraculous, the mysterious. He states:

There has never been in the history of the world and never will be anyone whom the wilderness fascinates as much as it does me. I don't know the wilderness well, the woods or the mountains, but the wilderness, anywhere it can be found, is a subject of endless interest and rejoicing to me. It is because it is so strange to me and so utterly foreign to anything that I have known that I do not really wish to become any better acquainted with the wilderness technically than I already am: only enough to survive whatever situations I might encounter. But who knows what those might be? Most of my poems about woods and lakes and rivers and so on depend on my not knowing these things very well, so that they remain strange to me: that is, so that they remain in at least some sense visions. (Sorties, 39.)

At Vanderbilt University he discovered that his was to be a poetry of strong narrative line, of personal emotional, visionary and bodily response to the bizarre and stressful in human experience, a poetry meant to "devour" the reader through "presentational immediacy," a phrase he borrows, without citation, from Alfred North Whitehead (Self-Interviews, 47), whose intended effect of spontaneity is to be achieved by the fusion, at white heat, of the disparate elements and images upon which the stimulated imagination feeds.--a fusion which creates the il1usion, the mystery, that these elements belong together in some heightened order of existence. The refrain, "Angels, beasts," in "Approaching Prayer" is a good example of an attempt at this visionary fusion of images. "I want to make a new reality," he says; "this one is not good enough. Words can change it all." (Dickey, with the exuberance of a romantic-modernist bard, writes occasionally as though he has dismissed the lesson learned by his favorite poet in high school, Byron, who records in "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" the post-adolescent discovery that "words are not things.")
This then is a poetry which when it leads the reader into the environing wilderness, does so with the expectation that something miraculous may occur, will occur! When Dickey imagines the sublime in nature, he does so not so much at the prompting of an atavistic urge to throw over civilization and return to an invigorating life of survival among the animals who fascinate him in the forest. Nor does the Natural Sublime appear in his poetry, as Basil Willey argues that it began to appear in the eighteenth century, as a substitute for a religion undermined by partisan theological controversy and the discoveries of science. Rather, the speakers of Dickey's poems experience in nature ecstatic moments of visitation by divine vision analogous to what, as Miller tells us, certain Puritans sought and experienced in spite of warnings against it, and what Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau actively sought in obedience to a God who is and always shall be more than the God of the texts and teachings handed down by the religious traditions.
In conclusion, Dickey complained of contemporary poetry generally, "It's time we got some glory back into it." He follows in a line of American inheritors of the Puritans possessed by what Miller calls "hunger for these excitements" of the spirit (Errand, p. 192), a hunger once barely contained within and thereafter haunted by the theological dialectic out of which much of our literature evolves.

WORKS CITED

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1975.
Davidson, Donald. The Attack on Leviathan. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1938.
Dickey, James. Poems 1957-1967. Storrs, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967.
____________. Self-Interviews. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970.
____________. Sorties. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.
____________. Interview, “Declarations From Dickey,” The State newpaper,
“Tempo” section, August 28, 1977, p.1.
Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1956.
Stanford, Donald E., ed. The Poems of Edward Taylor. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1960.
Willey, Basil. The Eighteenth Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature
In the Thought of the Period. London: Chatto and Windus, 1975

Religion and Literature Academic Papers Forum

From Dr. Kevin Lewis, Dept. of Religious Studies, USC

Call for Papers