Carl Jung observed that the rise of Western civilization necessitated the progressive repression of human instinctual life. Over time, this repression created an environment relatively free of disruptive instinctual aggression and facilitated more and more cooperation among the members of Western society. It also promoted a refinement of manners and moral behavior, which was reflected in the arts.

A problem for the most sensitive members of society, and for artists in particular, was that the ascendancy of reason at the expense of instinct separated the individual from sources of psychic energy in the lower and more primitive regions of the brain. Cognitive studies today have explained the reasons for this problem scientifically, but in the late nineteenth century, when the problem was becoming acute, when many felt that the abstractions of modern culture had created barriers between themselves and experience of the physical world, artists addressed the problem intuitively. This reaction can best be seen in the visual arts, where painters like Paul Gauguin chose primitive subjects and reverted to forms that were intuitive rather than realistic and reasonable.

In the early twentieth century, Pablo Picasso’s fascination with primitive African masks was the primary element that led to his 1907 masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which broke radically with the rational and realistic traditions of Western art. In poetry, T. S. Eliot felt this crisis most acutely, in his personal life and in his understanding of Western culture. Eliot, however, found no solution to the problem and could only vent his intellectual and spiritual frustrations in The Waste Land (1922).

A poet who did find a means to address the crisis was Robinson Jeffers: he isolated himself on the wild coast of California and chose for subjects the people of the area (as in his poem Roan Stallion [1925]), who were not separated by modern culture from their instinctual life. He also chose to use poetical lines derived from Anglo-Saxon and early Icelandic poetry (qualitative and alliterative, rather than modern quantitative, syllabic verse) to evoke an unsophisticated world not yet separated from its instinctual roots. Although Jeffers began his career quite early in the twentieth century, he continued to write until his death in 1962, well after the Second World War.

The most important figure among these Modern Primitives was William Carlos Williams. Like Jeffers, he began his career writing in traditional poetic forms but, also like Jeffers, found these forms inadequate to deal with what he saw as a civilization separated from the sources of vitality by excessive refinement and cultural intervention between the world of objects and the individual’s experience of them. Early in his career he attempted to subvert the rational world by plunging into the unconscious—both his own and that of his characters. This is most apparent in Kora in Hell (1920), where Kora (the feminine) represents the instincts which have been held in captivity by Hades (the masculine), representing the modern rational world. The book is an attempt to free the instincts and thus reestablish a more direct experience of the world.

A poem that carries this process a step further is “The Rose” (1923), in which Williams attempts to strip the rose of its many traditional associations and symbolism so the flower can be early in the century he continued to write after the Second World War, publishing some of his best work in the 1940s and 1950s. His long epic poem Patterson appeared in five parts between 1946 and 1958. A repeated motto of the epic is “no ideas but in things.” In other words, meanings should not be assigned to objects, for the object is thus obscured: only those ideas provoked by the object are to be considered. As the critic Kenneth Burke once said of Williams: “There is the eye, and there is the thing upon which the eye alights; while the relationship existing between the two is the poem. . . . Williams thus becomes . . . one of our most distinguished Neanderthal men.”

In his attempts to reestablish an unmediated experience of the objective world, Williams rejected traditional forms and meters and purified his language by imitating the speech rhythms and vocabulary of common people, thus avoiding what he considered the deadening effects of high culture. In important ways, Williams was the successor to Walt Whitman in his creation of an American populist poetry, but he was more acutely aware of the ways in which the language of refinement and respectability affected the individual’s ability to respond to the physical world.

William Carlos Williams

A poet strongly influenced by Williams was Theodore Roethke, whose major work appeared in the two decades following the Second World War. Roethke felt stultified by the cultural and poetic traditions that shaped his early work. In the years during the war and immediately after he attempted to slough off the cultural overlays which inhibited his poetic voice. In The Lost Son (1948) he does this by rejecting the human world and plunging into the slime of primordial existence. The underlying idea of these poems is that we contain within ourselves our evolutionary past: the residual history of our immense journey from the lowest life forms to our present status as humans.

Thus, in these poems, Roethke descends into the abyss of slime, slugs, minnows, worms—which are essentially metaphors for his own instincts. Human culture is temporarily abandoned as the poet tries to understand himself in terms of his most rudimentary animal nature. Once he reaches this understanding, he can begin his physical and spiritual ascent to recover the human, which he does by reentering society through a feminine figure (anima), who first rises out of his unconscious but later assumes the form of a real woman. The ascent out of the primitive self is a slow one, but the human world, once recovered, is prized all the more. In his last book, The Far Field (1964), he can accept and is comfortable with his animal, instinctual self and his connections with the natural world.

Roethke’s poetics in The Lost Son are a radical departure from the traditional poetic forms he had used in his early poetry. He uses primitive rhythms, suggesting the heartbeat, and, at times, his phrasing and vocabulary imitate the babbling of a young child. Indeed, in several poems the child is depicted in the womb, and the imagery attempts to capture what he might experience there. As the poet gradually returns to the adult human world in the volumes The Waking (1953) and Words for the Wind (1958), the verse forms become more traditional, indicating that he is now at home in the modern world, but this reconciliation has been achieved only after the ordeal of his descent into the primitive instinctual self.

Now he understands the complex nature of human life: how the instincts are the foundation upon which the conscious rational self rests. Robert Penn Warren was another poet of Roethke’s generation who struggled with the same psychological and cultural problems. His solutions were somewhat different, however. Warren grasped how modern rationalism—the result largely of the implications of John Locke’s philosophy, which denied the existence of instincts in humans—had isolated individuals from one another. Locke’s idea that our minds are initially “blank tablets,” and that we each create our own reality in the act of perception, implied that we all live in separate worlds: this effect is known philosophically as solipsism.

Warren’s solution to this problem was to suggest an undeniable connection between all humans in the unconscious instinctual self. In “Bearded Oaks” (1937) the poet describes himself and his lover as “twin atolls on a shelf of shade.” The image implies that above the ocean’s surface (the conscious rational world) the two appear to be separated from one another; but beneath the surface (the unconscious instinctual world) they are joined by the shelf of shade on which they rest. This shelf has been formed by our long evolutionary history: it consists of savagery, tribal aggression—all those aspects of the human psyche that we do not want to accept, and thus, we deny our instincts, which are the result of that evolutionary past.

Although Warren began publishing in the 1920s, his most important poetry appeared in the five decades following World War II; and although he formed his ideas about the importance of our instincts in the 1920s, these ideas inform his poetry throughout his career: only by accepting one’s instinctual life and darker selves can he understand who he is and join in a common humanity. This is particularly evident in Brother to Dragons (1953; revised edition, 1979), about Thomas Jefferson’s reaction to his nephew’s murder of a slave, and Audubon: A Vision (1969), about the Naturalist-painter’s difficulties in discovering his destiny.

Warren’s poetics remained largely traditional throughout his career, but he loosened meter and line length and took many liberties with traditional forms, such as the sonnet and ballad, to suggest that intuition and instinct took precedence over the rational orderly world of traditional prosody.

James Dickey was also aware of the problems modern culture created by preventing us from discovering our essential instinctual selves. The clearest manifestation of this idea is in his first novel, Deliverance (1970), where the four major characters experience the wildness of an untamed river and the savagery of two degenerate mountain men they encounter on their journey. The three men who survive the journey come away with a vivid understanding of primitive violence (the wild river and the mountain men) that lies under the placid surface (the lake that is slowly covering over the river) of modern life.

Similar themes are found in much of Dickey’s poetry prior to Deliverance: his characters seek ways of entering the natural world through hunting and imaginative projection of themselves into the lives of animals. In “Springer Mountain” (1962) a hunter sheds his clothes and tries to enter the world of his prey: finally, he realizes the absurdity of his gesture and reclaims his clothing; but he understands that his attempt was a necessary one. In “Approaching Prayer” (1964) the poet looks through the mounted head of a boar he once killed with an arrow and tries to see himself from the boar’s point of view—even devising a language for attempt to empathize with their fellow creatures, for through them we can begin to understand the instinctual parts of ourselves.

For Dickey the sacramental vision—the belief that all things are interrelated—was of utmost importance. His characters thus frequently attempt to enter and join with nature. The theme appears in poems and fiction throughout his career. It culminates at the end of his final novel, To the White Sea (1993), where the main character is literally absorbed into the landscape.

Like Williams, Dickey avoided traditional poetic forms because he found them inhibiting. In his early poetry he used most frequently a three-beat line like that in Roethke’s “Lost Son” poems, to much the same effect: a primitive hammered rhythm, suggesting the heartbeat of someone intent on capturing his subject. In his later poetry he used what he called a “split line”: wide spaces between groups of words suggested thought and speech units. Thus, like Jeffers, Williams, Warren, and Roethke (in his “Lost Son” poems), Dickey avoided the rational orderly pattern of traditional meters and verse forms.

Of course, no poet can entirely escape the rational world of modern culture and return to a primitive state of being, nor would he want to, but he can reduce the distance between himself and the concrete world in which he lives. He can also attempt to understand his own instinctual nature. That is what the five poets discussed above set out to do—each in his own way. They were not “primitive” in a literal sense, for all were among the most discerning artists of their era, but their ability to recover a more primitive mode of apprehending the world was a means of revalidating the physical realm and renewing life at its most vital levels.

Topics for Discussion and Research

1. All five poets treated here thought of their work as a reaction to modern culture, but William Carlos Williams was the most pointed in his disapproval of modern reductionism and abstraction. Analyze his 1923 volume Spring and All structurally and thematically to discover what he found objectionable in the complexities of modern life and what correctives he offered. James E. B. Breslin’s William Carlos Williams: An American Artist offers important insights in this regard.

2. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss observed that myths are superstructures built upon important human instincts. How do Robert Penn Warren in “The Ballad of Billie Potts” and Robinson Jeffers in “Roan Stallion” use myth to emphasize the importance of instinct as a primary motivating force in human life?

3. All five of these poets could be considered nature poets, but Theodore Roethke was more consciously writing in the tradition of English and American nature poetry than the other four. One of his most important insights is that nature is internal as well as external. By analyzing “The Lost Son” and “Meditation at Oyster River,” show how Roethke moved from despair to salvation, from helpless submersion in nature in the early poem to transcendence through nature in the later poem. Rosemary Sullivan’s Theodore Roethke: The Garden Master offers excellent ideas about Roethke as a nature poet.

4. James Dickey’s first book, Into the Stone, drew on and developed poetic techniques and rhythms he had discovered in Theodore Roethke’s “Lost Son” poems. Compare the prosody of the two poets in those works and show how their rhythms, images, and themes attempted to recover a “primitive” and vital experience of the world.

5. Robert Penn Warren’s Brother to Dragons is a criticism of the Enlightenment’s explanations of human behavior. In that poem, he uses Thomas Jefferson as an embodiment of Enlightenment values, which are undermined by the criminal behavior of his own nephew. Using the 1979 version of the poem, analyze Warren’s characterization of Jefferson and explain how Warren’s own understanding of human behavior is antirational and based on instinct as the most powerful motivating force. Victor Strandberg’s The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren is particularly helpful in offering a Jungian reading of Warren’s psychology.

Resources

• James E. B. Breslin, William Carlos Williams: An American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
  An excellent, concise, and accurate study of the doctor-poet-novelist, which offers important insights into Williams’s aesthetic and character.

• Kenneth Burke, “The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke,” Sewanee Review, 58 (Winter 1950): 68–108.
  An illuminating early article by one of the most important critics of the period.

• Robert Kirschten, James Dickey and the Gentle Ecstasy of Earth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).
  A sensitive study of Dickey’s ability to draw on nature for energy and renewal.

• Victor H. Strandberg, The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1977).
  The best single study of the poet: it takes a Jungian approach to the work.

• Rosemary Sullivan, Theodore Roethke: The Garden Master (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975).
  Offers a careful study of the poet’s use of natural imagery and themes.

Categories: Literature

Tags: 20th-century poets, African masks, American populist poetry, Bearded Oaks, Carl Jung, conscious rational self, cultural intervention, cultural overlays in poetry, Deliverance, evolutionary history, evolutionary past, existentialism in poetry, human nature, hunting, instinctual life, instinctual nature in poetry, instinctual self, James Dickey, Kora in Hell, modern culture, modern poetry, modern primitive poets, modern rationalism, nature and instinct, Pablo Picasso, Patterson, Paul Gauguin, Poetry, primitive aggression, primitive art, primitive rhythms, primitive subjects, psychological and cultural problems, repression of instincts, Robert Penn Warren, Robinson Jeffers, spiritual ascent, subconscious, T.S. Eliot, The Lost Son, The Waste Land, Theodore Roethke, unconscious, Western civilization, William Carlos Williams, William Carlos Williams influence