Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness, and: Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice, and: Going by Contraries: Robert Frost's Conflict with Science (review)

It is hard to tell whether Peter O'Leary has tapped into a new way of thinking about poetry or has merely contrived new names for the familiar ways. His Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness examines writings by H.D., Freud, and Duncan himself for traces of "gnosis," by which O'Leary seems to mean a nonrational or extrarational insight provoked by the crisis of illness. Duncan's verse then becomes, in this formulation, the medium "through which he transmits his gnosis and through which it was translated to him" (21). Although O'Leary plunders mythology, psychology, and medicine for support, the reader is hard put to distinguish his thesis in any substantial way from the traditional notion of inspiration.

Turning to Duncan's poetry, however, O'Leary offers a great deal that is indisputably new. In his long, detailed discussion of "My Mother Would Be a Falconess," O'Leary looks to the notebooks Duncan kept while composing the poem, to the handwritten manuscript, and to Duncan's influences, with Robert Graves's The White Goddess perhaps most prominent among them. Most important, he looks at the poem itself with a level of detail rarely found in studies of such a strong theoretical bent. He discovers puns, polyvalences, allusions (private and public)—and shows how each contributes to a poem in which, he claims, Duncan "unleashes the raptor of his imagination on the memory of his mother" (163). Finally, he hears the music that is intrinsic to the poem's meaning, noting how it modulates according to mood. His fifty-six pages on "My Mother Would Be a Falconess" argue strongly for the usefulness of O'Leary's thesis, regardless of whether it is something new under the sun.

For O'Leary's "gnosis," Devin Johnston substitutes "the occult." In Precipitations, Johnston takes a much narrower focus than his title suggests, looking closely at the work of only three poets: H.D., Robert Duncan, and James Merrill. "When the need arises," he writes, "occultism can assist poetry in defamiliarizing the modern world and thus critiquing its pretensions to rational systemization" (2). However, even though his notion of the occult seems not unlike the old idea that a vast part of our experience resists reduction to formula or theory, his choice of words is at least partly justified by his showing how these three poets studied (or at least dabbled in) literal occultism and infused much of their poetry with what they found.

Not surprisingly, William Blake stands at the center of the triangle of poets under consideration. "Blake rebelled against the mind-forged manacles of materialist philosophy and its skepticism. He insistently opposes reason with imagination," Johnston writes, adding that for Duncan, "Blake largely serves as the prototypical poet of inspiration" (2, 4). Whatever Duncan, H.D., or Merrill thought of Blake, and whatever experiments they may have conducted with Ouija boards and séances, most readers will want to know what difference all this makes to the poetry itself. Johnston moves quickly to specifics: "[T]he poet writes in a double bind: On the one hand, he composes a poem through mastery and control over language; on the other hand, he is in subjection to that language. Following Romantic models, Duncan dramatizes this double-bind through poetics of dictation" (51). In detailed analysis, Johnston shows how this "poetics of dictation" informs the three poets' major works...