Literature begins with the silence of the gods. As long as extra-human powers spoke to human beings, who communicated their messages in poems, stories, and dramas, “literature” in our contemporary sense could not exist. That we can now see writing as the free expression of personal views and talents (or as a move within systems of prestige, or as an instrument of ideology), means that we have forgotten its origin and essence.
The major poets of the Western canon, however, lived in remembrance. They believed themselves divinely inspired, or aspired to such inspiration, or despaired of its impossibility for themselves and for their age. This was so even down to at least the end of the previous century, when two of America’s most central poets, James Merrill and Gary Snyder (although they differed in nearly every manner having to do merely with aesthetics and politics) held, albeit with some self-protective ironies, conversation with gods.
In a 1980 essay in The New Republic, ostensibly reviewing a new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Merrill made this point firmly but obliquely (indeed few readers then or since seem to have noticed). He turned at the outset from the topic at hand to an extended polemic against T.S. Eliot. One might consider that poet-critic—whose conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, after all, is one of the most famous episodes in the literary history of American modernism—as an ally of the position that literature is a conversation with the divine. Merrill argued, however, that Eliot was still far too secular.
For Eliot, as Merrill put it, the problem for contemporary American readers (presumed to be secular humanists) facing “Dante’s passionate faith,” the intensity of his medieval Catholicism, is how to respect the ideas that animate his poetry while holding on honestly to “our intrepid doubts” about religion. We learn to do so, as we read Eliot’s criticism and poetry, by absorbing his perspicacious erudition, attentive pleasure, and respectful consideration of the author so that we achieve an inner balance. A presumed “we” unwilling to either embrace traditional Christianity or unwilling to part with the literary canon (most of whose masterworks seem to presuppose the former, when they do not presuppose paganism) can, through the medium of Eliot’s thought, remain in conversation with a tradition to which “we” can no longer assent. This was not, Merrill averred, a good thing.
From a perspective other than Merrill’s, Eliot, whose intellectual outlook turned with age to an increasingly stiff and conservative defense of Christian orthodoxy, might be said to have repudiated the agnostic liberal humanist compromise in favor of old-fashioned religion. But for Merrill, what readers of The New Republic needed to believe in was neither the Christianity of Dante, nor the hope of agnostic literati reconciled to the Great Books. Even in his later style of religious conservatism, Merrill suggested, Eliot misunderstood Dante, taking him as a fellow traditionalist who sought to expound Christian teaching. Such a reading foreclosed the possibility that Dante was not merely using Catholic theology as material for an epic poem, but was an authentic “visionary” whose writing was inspired, or even composed, by a “sustaining divinatory intelligence.”
If it appears blasphemous to some believers that the Bible might be read as literature, and not as the Word of God, it may be no less blasphemous to read as literature The Divine Comedy. The author of The Wasteland and The Four Quartets had understood, Merrill implied, neither the spiritual essence of literary history nor the trans-historical vocation of the poet, which is to receive and transmit a message from elsewhere. Merrill was telling readers of The New Republic, whom he represented (likely correctly) as secular humanists posing as open-minded aesthetes, that poets are prophets, through whom God, or the Muse, or at any rate Something, speaks. And, Merrill implied, was still speaking through him, Merrill, as it had spoken through Dante.
In subsequent interviews, until his death from AIDS in 1995, Merrill would qualify and ironize the claim that poetry is divinely inspired. He never admitted himself a prophet. But despite these hesitations, the claim, in all its disorienting intensity, underwrites his longest, most challenging, and in many places most beautiful and moving work, the trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover. Published as one volume in 1983, the text is composed of The Book of Ephraim (1976), Mirabell’s Books of Number (1978), and Scripts for the Pageant (1980), along with a Coda (1983). Together they recount revelations that Merrill and his partner David Jackson received over the course of hundreds of sessions together at the Ouija board, where they were given news of the past, present, and future from a series of unworldly voices, such as that of Ephraim, a slave from ancient Rome, or the terrifying and bewildering clamors from entities beyond human comprehension.
He presented his relationship to those intelligences as uneasy. “Whoever the Powers are we’ve been avoiding/ take possession, speed us far downstream,” Merrill writes in the opening section of Mirabell, as he and Jackson learn that forces far greater than the genial Ephraim are now communicating to them through the Ouija board. These Powers demand of the pair to transcribe “POEMS OF SCIENCE” (the Powers not only have a capital P, but speak in all caps, though whether the ultimate effect of this is to make them seem more authoritative or more ludicrous must be each reader’s choice), to which Merrill responds, like many Old Testament prophets to God’s baffling, rebarbative demands, “Ugh.”
Three years before Merrill’s essay on Dante, the poet Gary Snyder had made the same claim for poetry in a quite different setting, and without moderation. His book of essays, The Old Ways (1977), brought to press by City Lights, the leading publisher of poets like Allen Ginsberg and other Beats, featured on the cover cartoons of anthropomorphic bear and fox shamans in Native American garb. It was not aimed at readers of The New Republic.
Snyder, like Merrill, insisted that poets are vessels through whom a super-human entity communicates. Unlike Merrill, however, he made this claim not by examining what a particular poet (Dante) had said in his poetry about an experience of inspiration, but by elaborating a millennia-long account of history and anthropology. “As Robert Graves points out in The White Goddess,” Snyder argued, the Western canon should be read as a long struggle by “the Muse” to make herself heard through poets past the stifling oppressions of religious and secular creeds. The divinatory intelligence is a woman constantly interrupted.
Robert Graves, perhaps best-known today for his campy historical novel I, Claudius (1934), was a poet in his own right, as well as an amateur theorist of everything. His eccentric monograph The White Goddess (1948), an influential theory of poetry and religion, described an ancient cult of the goddess-muse as the source of literary inspiration. His book was itself inspired, if not directly by the Muse, then by a fellow member of a short-lived romantic foursome, the poet Laura Riding (who later gave up on poetry to pursue a distinctly un-mythical philosophical investigation of language into which few readers have followed her).
Snyder read The White Goddess soon after its initial publication. It was a major source for his account of Native American myth in his bachelor’s thesis at Reed College, and for the vision of primal pagan matriarchy elaborated in his books of poetry, like Myths and Texts, and prose, like The Old Ways. Many of his poems are addressed to, or ventriloquize, various goddesses. In a passage from Axe Handles (1983), for example, he reenacts a visitation from the divine mother by which a “real” weather event becomes a portal for the entry of the Goddess into the world and the poet’s awareness:
24:IV:40075, 3:30 PM,
n. of Coaldale, Nevada
a Glimpse through a Break
in the Storm of the Summit
of the White Mountains
O Mother Gaia
Sky cloud gate milk snow
wind-void-word
I bow in roadside gravel
What Snyder says in his poetry about women, human and divine, can be so misogynist one wonders whether the Muse—assuming the extra-human power of poetic inspiration to be the divine feminine—would want to speak with him, or what it would say about the Muse if she did. Metaphorical invocations of vaginas (often with cruder words than that), and paeans to his woman-of-the-moment as avatar of the earth goddess, abound, but the most alarming poem is surely “For a Far-Out Friend,” from Riprap (1959), addressed to a girlfriend Snyder drunkenly beat up (in a note added to a recent edition of his collected poetry, Snyder insisted that the incident never happened; he’d thought saying that he’d beaten a woman made him sound “manly”).
An aggressive, abusive masculinity runs through many of Snyder’s most ecologically-minded poems. He calls on readers to save the Earth from what he often presents as a kind of rape committed by loggers, polluters, and secular or Christian thinkers who see the natural world as under human (male) dominion. He fulminates against the “prophets of Israel” and “fairies of Athens” who cut down the groves of the ancient fertility goddess who is another avatar of the Muse (“Logging,” Myths and Texts). And yet, perhaps no one has more sharply critiqued—at least from within them—male projections about the “divine feminine” than Snyder did in Regarding Wave (1967), a cycle of poems dedicated to (and in the voice of) the goddess of destruction, Kali. One of the most biting passages runs in part:
To hell with your Fertility Cult, I
never did want to be fertile,
you think this world is just
a goddamn oversize cunt?
[…] he had nothing to say.
It may be, however, that for the male poet to picture himself silenced by the goddess of wrath is only another ruse to keep talking, while satisfying a certain self-punishing sado-masochistic desire. The poet, even as he claims to have “nothing to say” on his own behalf, is still speaking, wearing goddess drag.
Merrill’s use of Graves’s ideas—like his willingness to assume the mantle of divinatory poetry—was more ironic and cautious, just as his misogyny was (we might say, stereotypically) bitchy and verbal rather than swaggering and battering. Midway through Mirabell, as the ghost of W.H. Auden (who serves much the same function in the poem that Virgil served in The Divine Comedy) is explaining some technicality about the structure of the celestial hierarchy, Merrill questions Auden’s information, citing Robert Graves as an authority. “MY DEAR,” Auden replies (speaking through the Ouija board, he can only use capital letters), “CAN ONE TRUST POOR RG? A USEFUL HACK/ BUT HIS WHITE GODDESS? WE REMAIN I FEAR/ IN A MALE WORLD DESPITE HIS DRUDGERY.” It will turn out, over the course of the poem, that Auden’s views—that of an elitist male homosexual with prejudices of an earlier century (in this respect this representation of Auden is not dissimilar to Merrill himself, either as a character in the poem or as a historical person)—should not be taken as the authoritative version of the message transmitted by divinatory intelligences.
Readers may recoil from Merrill and Snyder’s assertions that poetry is truly inspired as well as from the attitudes towards women that their poems evince. In this sense, both poets can be called “canonical” insofar as they present us with the same problems with which nearly all the poets of the Western canon, from Homer and Vergil to Milton and Pope, Eliot and Pound, vex or enrage us. They make claims about poetry that seem impossible to take seriously, and they say things (not least about women) that cannot but give offense. Whether upholding or mocking the thesis of The White Goddess, Snyder and Merrill assume an apparently humble position as intermediary of forces greater than themselves, which allows them to speak for, past, and over many other human beings. There is perhaps no better way to retain discursive power and centrality than by seeming to have become merely the spokesman of a superior power—the goddess, or history, or justice—which might well be imagined in the form of a member of a group for which the speaker nevertheless demonstrates contempt.
Facing squarely the disgust that Merrill and Snyder’s pretensions to inspiration and attitudes towards women may spark in us is also a reminder that, insofar as poets really may be prophets, readers might find themselves in sympathy with those who, as Jesus put it, killed the prophets before building monuments to them (Luke 11:47). Jesus, of course, meant this as a rebuke, but from the perspective of literary history, we might take it as good advice on how to deal with intolerable geniuses. We can—and usually do—neutralize their outrageous ideas by consigning them to categories like “literature,” which is meant to be read without being believed. The canon is a sepulcher for honored dead we could not bear to have alive again.
But the inescapable implication of Snyder and Merrill is that poetry cannot be rightly read as a means of producing aesthetic pleasure, or private ethical self-edification, or supporting moral and political norms. Much of what passes for contemporary literary criticism consists merely of squabbles for priority among these modes of avoiding what Snyder and Merrill argue the essence of writing is: a transcribing of voices other than human. If we are to read a writer as he reads other writers—if we are to take him seriously as a poet and critic—then we cannot meet such statements with benevolent condescension or smirking bemusement. We could ask instead what it means for two poets with few shared aesthetic allegiances to have linked themselves to what they supposed to be the primordially ancient understanding of poetry as something done to, and through, the poet by a power whose messages must be heeded rather than enjoyed, studied, or reconciled to our own pieties.
Born, respectively, the year before and the year after the start of the Great Depression (1929), Merrill and Snyder grew up at nearly the furthest possible ends of the socio-economic spectrum. Merrill was heir to the Merrill Lynch fortune and blue-blood gentility, Snyder to blue-collar poverty and working-class socialism. Merrill’s rearing was East Coast (New York City), Snyder’s West Coast (Seattle, Portland). Their adult fascinations would take them for years further in opposite directions (Merrill to Greece, Snyder to Japan). Both came to poetry early, reading and writing themselves into scarcely overlapping networks of literary ancestors and contemporaries.
’’’They do not seem to have known each other. Merrill was friends with one of the minor Beat poets, Allen Ansen, but displayed in his correspondence and poetry contempt for the Beats and their concerns, which were central to Snyder’s life and writing. He was mockingly indifferent to Eastern spirituality and the fate of New Left political movements, and hostile to the Beats’ desire to further the efforts of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams in transforming American prosody by breaking the hold of iambic pentameter on our idiom and founding a new national style through a fusion of avant-garde and (vaguely) East Asian forms. At their best, Snyder’s poems achieve this, rooting aesthetic modernism, with expanded multicultural horizons, firmly in the landscape of the western United States and in an acerbic critique of American society.
Merrill’s early verse, in contrast, was modeled on the most precious and recherché moments of Wallace Stevens, and won him the support of influential critics friendly to stylistic traditionalism, such as Richard Howard. Over the ’60s and early ’70s, his poetry became more personal and direct, working towards a characteristic combination of apparently off-hand chattiness and technical virtuosity that allowed him to discuss nearly any topic in a manner either (depending on the reader’s tolerance for such things) amiably brilliant or annoyingly unserious.
His attitude towards the spiritual in the years before (and after) Sandover was masterfully flippant, as in the poem “Mandala,” from Braving the Elements (1972), which begins:
OK. I see a whirlpool
Yawning at the heart of things.
In grave procession seasons, elements, creatures, kings,
Ride the slowly sinking carrousel.
This is a parodic reworking of Yeats’s mystical vision of decline in “The Second Coming,” by which the Irish poet’s “widening gyre” becomes the spinning circle of a fairground attraction. Dismissing news of doom with a flippant “OK,” Merrill is speaking to—and scolding—some off-stage voice. The poem ends:
[…] So there
Your point’s made, I’m an infidel.
But who needs friends
To remind him that nothing either lasts or ends?
Garrulous as you, dear, time will tell.
If the poet is a prophet, he’s a reluctant one, eager to shut up his “friend” who reveals the void at the heart of existence.
Snyder, in contrast, was from the beginning of his career vatic and admonitory, making proclamations about the path America ought to take (back to the land, away from Christianity and capitalism). He is today perhaps best known and most admired for the early volume Myths and Texts (1960), which blends modernist and Asian influences with an interest in Native American myth, ecology, and a strident social critique in compellingly spare forms. The poems alternate between matter-of-fact descriptions of natural phenomena (especially flora and fauna of the mountain West) and references to a cosmopolitan range of texts perhaps even wider and stranger than Pound’s repertory in Personae and The Cantos. Snyder has no shyness speaking about—and as—such figures as the Buddha of the Future or the trickster deity Coyote, who pass through him messages to all inhabitants of our planet. To those—like the Merrill of “Mandala”—who seem content with an aesthetic approach to literature he fumes, “you think sex art and travel are enough? / you’re a skinful of cowdung.”
We could ask instead what it means for two poets with few shared aesthetic allegiances to have linked themselves to what they supposed to be the primordially ancient understanding of poetry as something done by a power whose messages must be heeded rather than enjoyed, studied, or reconciled to our own pieties.
Across their different poetics and politics, Merrill and Snyder shared intellectual points of reference. Besides their common debts to Robert Graves, the two men were fascinated by the work of Heinrich Zimmer, the German Indologist who shaped many of his friend Joseph Campbell’s ideas about the archetypical, universal aspects of myth. Each came to take seriously the notion that poetry comes not from the poet’s own skillful manipulation of the contents of his consciousness and the elements of his language, but from the eruption, through both, of something beyond the poet and perhaps beyond the human. In order to enhance their receptivity to that something (and, it must be imagined, often simply for pleasure), both practiced forms of free love, drug use, and meditation (Zen for Snyder, Transcendental for Merrill)—practices that were widespread, if not always so poetic, in their domestic and expatriate bohemias.
They both, too, responded to a perceived challenge from the work of Wittgenstein, without having necessarily understood it. They each took from the Austrian philosopher of language—or what they had heard about his ideas—the lesson that philosophy had arrived at a dead end, exhausting its enterprise in the realization that there were dimensions of human experience about which it was not possible to make logical, rational, or even coherent statements. If philosophy had found its limits, the two poets independently reasoned, poetry would have to take up the task (which really had been its own all along) of illuminating those aspects of life about which Wittgenstein had ordered philosophers to pass over in silence. This was, they realized, a religious mission—the work of giving meaning, through myth, story, and art, to our individual and collective experience.
In 1978, for example, Snyder recalled in an interview that a college encounter with the work of Wittgenstein had sparked his desire to write poetry. If the philosophers themselves acknowledged philosophy was inadequate, he argued, “then let’s write poetry.”
Merrill, at the same moment, was twisting Wittgenstein’s famous dictum, “The world is everything that is the case.” At the start of one of the most beautiful passages of the Sandover trilogy, he asks, and then commands: “The world is everything that was the case? / Open the case.” Philosophy, he suggests, only speaks (or should speak) of what has already happened. Philosophers’ statements, referring to an imagined totality of things (“the world”) known in the present tense (“is”), assume a power on their part to know that, if granted, would make what they purport to know (the world) appear already completed, closed, and dead. Poetry, as an act of imagination, rejects the limitations of philosophy, knowledge, and the present tense. It leaps from the stasis of being into the flux of becoming, and inaugurates the new.
Out of Merrill’s “case,” like Pandora’s, comes a parade of grotesques. Through a variety of emissaries, including Plato, the archangels, and God B (Biology), Merrill gives, or is given, a never fully coherent and often shifting vision in which the structure of the atoms, the interaction of the elements (both those from medieval alchemy and the modern periodic table), and the teleology of history (which is perhaps cyclical) mirror each other. All are expressions of a common super-sensual reality that can also be understood allegorically as the story of the fall of the rebel angels from Heaven, the creation of humanity, and our species’ gradual evolution, guided by beneficent entities described as scientists in celestial research labs, towards a new being who will transcend our limitations, unhappiness, and, it seems, our characteristic self-consciousness (the glimpses we get of the post-human super-people make them seem, like Nietzsche’s Overman, hardly the sort of beings one would want over for dinner).
Merrill’s prophecy combines Christianity with modern anti-religious critiques (Jesus, the Buddha, and Mohammed appear in the poem as a pathetic sadsack, misunderstood loser, and imbecilic fanatic, respectively), emphasizing a progressive narrative in which human beings must work with the heavenly powers of science to emancipate ourselves out of existence. This process requires, to the chagrin of Merrill as a character in the poem, periodic waves of mass death, such as plagues and wars, to make fresh souls available in Heaven as raw material for experiments in the supra-mundane labs. Much like ancient prophets justifying historical catastrophes as part of God’s perfect plan for his chosen people, Merrill offered a vision in which humanity is battered, if not for its own good, then for the good of its better replacement. In its own way—cosmic, epic, and collective rather than domestic, lyric and intimate—this is as chilling an apology for violence as Snyder’s rhapsody on woman-beating.
Merrill’s admirers, such as Helen Vender, Harold Bloom and Langdon Hammer, labored for decades in their critical appraisals to downplay the absurd and terrifying elements of Sandover as they pushed their poet towards the center of the canon (praising chiefly his other, restrainedly personal work, and the cozier Ephraim). But such an enterprise, to the extent that it succeeds, risks ignoring the point Merrill insisted on in his review of Dante. In what should be read as an implicit statement of his own poetics, he defied critics who, following Eliot, evade acknowledging—and thus accepting or rejecting—a great poet’s prophetic vocation. This places critics, and us, in a difficult position. Hardly anyone, including Merrill himself when asked in interviews about Sandover, would wish to endorse the content of his visions, or even to believe that he really believed in them. One might well seek to preserve a certain hermeneutic freedom to avoid having to say that he was either a madman, fraud, or prophet (a trilemma much like that which C.S. Lewis wished to corner readers into, in regard to Jesus’ claims to be the son of God).
Perhaps the solution lies in the hands of the poets rather than the critics—or rather lies in the poets becoming critics themselves. In a counter-motion to his dominant tendency of polemical seriousness, Snyder composed in 1969 one of American literature’s most goofily playful prophecies, which may indicate what should be our line of flight. His “Smokey the Bear Sutra,” unlike the often unrelentingly shrill or smugly self-certain poems of his major works, is a short stand-alone prose poem modeled on traditional Buddhist sutras. It rests on the central conceit that Smokey Bear (mistakenly referred to as Smokey the Bear by Snyder and many Americans) is the present-day incarnation of Vairocana, whom Snyder calls “the Great Sun Buddha,” often understood to be the unmanifested form of the historical Gautama Buddha.
According to Snyder—and we are immediately given to wonder if our collective leg is being pulled—the Vairocana Buddha summoned all beings “about 150 million years ago” for a sermon, in which he revealed that “there will be a continent called America,” organized around “great centers of power” like “Walden Pond.” Humanity, however, “in spite of its own strong intelligent Buddha nature,” will poison the continent. In order to save it, Vairocana Buddha will appear in the “future American era” as “SMOKEY THE BEAR.” The capital letters, unlike Merrill’s in Sandover, seem an unambiguous indication that Snyder is having some fun and inviting us to laugh with him. The description of Smokey is ludicrous from the start in its explanations of the cartoon bear’s characteristics blended with the jargon of Eastern Wisdom:
A handsome smokey-colored brown bear standing on his hind legs, showing that he is aroused and watchful.
Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances; cuts the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;
His left paw in the Mudra of Comradely Display…
Wearing the broad-brimmed hat of the West, symbolic of the forces that guard the Wilderness, which is the Natural State of the Dharma and the True Path of man on earth; all true paths lead through the mountains…
Those who heed Smokey’s message by “becoming free of cars, houses, canned foods, universities, and shoes” will not only save “this country America” but also “always have ripe blackberries to eat.”
In a commentary to the poem, Snyder made a relatively modest claim to his own inspiration, saying “I was seized by the power of the chance” to write the sutra when the connection dawned on him between the image of Smokey Bear and the ancient cults of bear-worship common to both the Ainu of northern Japan and many indigenous peoples of western North America. It occurred to him, “not without some pleasure,” that by inventing the Smokey mascot in 1942, the United States Forest Service had made itself the vector for “the resurfacing of our ancient benefactor as Guide and Teacher, the government not even knowing it.” Here the task of the poet is not a matter of direct possession by extra-human powers (even those as modest as “chance”). Rather he must play critic (or priestly commentator on history’s lectionary). He explains, through an original work of art, the ongoing message of the divinatory intelligences who transmit new/old myths into our world through fallible human agents who, precisely, do not know themselves to be poets or prophets.
Where Merrill in The New Republic implicitly identifies, and almost commands readers to identify, himself with Dante as an inspired poet, Snyder here figures a more complicated connection between his own poetry and the accidentally mythopoetic creativity of the U.S. Forest Service. Some “power of chance” does speak through poets, he suggests, but the gods, or muses, or whatever names we might give to the ultimate and inhuman energies at the back of our speech, express themselves in oblique, humorous fashion through state bureaucracies, artifacts of popular culture, and other unwitting agents. It is not, from this perspective—which in Snyder’s oeuvre exists perhaps only fleetingly or even exclusively in this slim moment—those who claim inspiration who are inspired. The poet/prophet who knows himself to be one is not one. Rather, our whole culture is a continual churning out of which myths long forgotten reemerge—the bear-shaman as avatar of ancient solar Buddha among them. The task of the poet, here, is to undergo the mildest of possessions, seized merely by such opportunities as pass to catch sight of and celebrate the self-renewing of archetypes across the unconscious poetry/prophecy of which our culture, often unbeknownst to us, is composed.
Such a second-degree poet-critic, inspired by “chance,” keeping contact with the elemental powers while maintaining a certain respectful but not un-playful distance, might avoid the almost demonic states in which Merrill and Snyder (despite the largely unpolitical irony in Merrill’s case and leftist commitments in Snyder’s) give voice to crude, violent, all-too-human prejudices. Could it also avoid the errors that Merrill condemned in Eliot, or Snyder condemned in aesthetes, who read even the most incantatory poetry merely as decorous and edifying enjoyment? To say so is to wish for the sort of reconciliation from which Merrill, in his essay on Dante, barred us as from Paradise. But Snyder suggests in his reading of his own poem on Smokey Bear that we are, at least in some moments as writers and readers, already in the paradise of reconciliations, if only we know how to read the book of the world—how to see, as they cast shadows that appear to us as cartoons, propaganda, and other misshapen modern myths, the fresh and ancient gods.