bleaknesses; or will the dark mortalities have
their edges bleached by sentimental compro-
mise? If we take seriously Stevens’ premise that
death is the mother of beauty, an analogous
premise shaped a little flatfootedly by Kinnell
into ‘‘another kind of glory in our lives’’—then
any poetics becomes at best a poetics of tragedy;
but in dilution, a poetry of cloying pathos.
If we follow Kinnell in the things he tells to
no one, God is a distant concept to be set off with
inverted commas. The only knowable part of
‘‘God’’ is the ‘‘music of grace that we hear’’—
or, all that is knowable of grace is the music or
poetry of life. Yet in this prose, frequently at
variance with the speech of his poems, Kinnell
limits poetry’s capacity to fuse connections
between life and eternity: poetry is only ‘‘almost
capable’’ of beating back time and death. Kinnell
is not consistently certain where, or if, the poetic
act should be divinized. In this essay, a doubt
about the transfigurative powers of language
eventually registers in the poetry as the lesser
force of nostalgia; a conceptual scheme of reality
in which language is never more than the etiola-
tions of print. In Kinnell’s secularized human-
ism, uncertainty cuts edge away from the blade.
Skepticism becomes a blurring diffidence where
poetry denuded of religious authority, of secur-
ity within Blake’s ‘‘Human Form Divine,’’ can-
not sustain or accept the merely human as a style
of holiness without gods. Suspended homelessly
between invention and experience, between
speaking and being Kinnell’s poets drop their
prophetic mantles....
An inheritor of ‘‘l’univers concentration-
naire,’’ and wary of anything leading to a reli-
gion of art, Kinnell does not toss us bon-mots in
the style of Pound: ‘‘Religion: another of the
numerous failures resulting from an attempt to
popularize art.’’ About ‘‘God’’ Kinnell isn’t sure;
about poetry, its fitful illumination flows from
what becomes ‘‘in the bedraggled poem of the
modern... the images, those lowly touchers of
physical reality, which remain shining.’’ Or, in
the nominalist tradition, poetic images flow and
shine in the apparent power of thing over word.
Given this perspective on the bedraggled
language of the modern, to what degree can
Kinnell’s prose be said to rule, or over-rule the
convictions of his poetry? It is instructive to
begin by comparing a strong elegy for a brother;
‘‘Freedom New Hampshire,’’ from 1960’sWhat
A Kingdom It Was,with family elegies from the
current book. The early poem is quite explicit in
its refusal to have its grief mitigated by belief in
the comforts of the resurrection:
When a man dies he dies trying to say with-
out slurring
The abruptly decaying sounds. It is true
That only flesh dies, and spirit flowers with-
out stop
For men, cows, dung, for all dead things;
and it is good, yes—
But an incarnation is in particular flesh
And the dust that is swirled into a shape
And crumbles and is swirled again had but
one shape
That was this man. When he is dead the
grass
heals what he suffered, but he remains dead,
And the few who loved him know this until
they die.
Similarly, the theme of resurrection, or
incarnate flesh as immortal spirit, is passed
upon ironically in ‘‘The Supper after the Last,’’
again from the early book, where Kinnell has
Christ speak this doctrine:
From the hot shine where he sits his whis-
pering drifts:
You struggle from flesh into wings; the
change exists.
But the wings that live gripping the contours
of the dirt
Are all at once nothing, flesh and light lifted
away.
You are the flesh; I am the resurrection,
because I am the light
I cut to your measure the creeping piece of
darkness
That haunts you in the dirt. Step into light—
I make you over. I breed the shape of your
grave in the dirt.
In both of these poems, the energy gained is
the energy of their unbelief. Earth is read uncom-
promisingly as the site that confers meaning.
Heavenly transfiguration is not our dominion
because our turf remains turf.
‘‘The Sadness of Brothers’’ picks up the
death of a brother again, but this time twenty-
one years later, loss is differently approached:
He comes to me like a mouth
speaking from under several inches of water.
I can no longer understand what he is
saying.
He has become oneBlackberry Eating