Trafficking in the Radiant: The Spiritualization of American Poetry

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 2005 by Sadoff, Ira

A principal component for Freud was the feeling of helplessness, occurring in a number of different areas, namely external dangers, internal impulses, death, and society. As wish-fulfilling illusions, religious faith and gods had specific tasks: "They must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings which a civilized life in common has imposed on them."12

Freud believed religion developed in response to human feelings of helplessness in the face of a world they cannot control. . . . Just as children have their earthly father to protect them from the common dangers of life, Freud believed this need is often carried forward into adulthood and subsequently projected into the heavens creating a "Heavenly Father" who also protects and cares for people. Alongside this religious rituals were developed to protect the human ego from sexual impulses, thoughts and fantasies which had been repressed because the Church viewed such things as sinful. These rituals were a defence against these impulses ever finding expression in reality. To compensate this ritualistic 'castration' religion promises an after-life which will compensate the believer for the earthly pleasures they have given up.13

Freud brings me full-circle to a different historical world-view, a view I believe provides one vitalizing way to inhabit this world. Interestingly, during the decade 1965-75, a time of social protest and unrest, statistics reveal a severe enrollment drop for seven mainline Protestant bodies (by contrast both with their gains in the preceding ten years and with the continuing growth of selected conservative churches). "The gap . . . is more than 29 percentage points."14 Those years registered wide-sweeping critiques of institutions, governmental and otherwise; during that time we saw enormous growth in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement and the feminist movement. The scientific, philosophical, psychological and metaphysical discoveries of modernism became a pervasive discourse in mainstream culture. Freud's theories, Einstein's theory of Relativity, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism," Derrida's and Foucault's work all suggested a world without a priori design, a world where truth was relative and shifting. The movement toward acceptance of these values had a great effect on our poems and our lives. In poetry, respect for the irrational and materiality was expressed in the surrealist and realist poetry of the generation of Simic, Tate, James Wright, Merwin, Levine, Rich, Etheridge Knight, Ginsberg and others. There was an unprecedented interest in translation, in the poetry of other cultures. Traditions counter to the canon, many overtly social and political and linguistic-from African-American poetry's restoration of the oral tradition to feminist poets addressing the social concerns of women, to postmodern poets challenging the aesthetics of Modernism and representation-not only thrived but influenced the terms of our poetry during the years that followed. These poets' faith and doubts were tied to the social world and the here-and-now on earth. It's not that they lacked a faith in the impalpable, but rather that the impalpable-love, for example-grew out of the material world and our imaginative associations with it.