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Through To The White: Initiation And Creation In The Poetry Of Kenneth White

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Through To The White: Initiation And Creation In The Poetry Of Kenneth White

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Xerox University Microfilms
300 North Zaab RoW
Ann Arbor, Michigan 40106
75-6433
NOVAK, Lynn Taylor, 1944-
1HR0UGH TO T* WHITE: INITIATION AND
CREATION IN HE POETRY OF KENNETH WHITE.
University of Southern California
Ph.D., 1974
Language and Literature, modern
Xerox University Microfilms , Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106
THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED.
© 1974
LYNN TAYLOR NOVAK
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
\
THROUGH TO THE WHITE:
INITIATION AND CREATION IN THE POETRY OF KENNETH WHITE
by
Lynn Taylor Novak
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Comparative Literature)
July 1971+
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
TH E OR AD UATE SCHO O L
U N IV E R S IT Y PARK
LO S A N O E L U . C A L IF O R N IA SOO07
This dissertation, written by
_______ LYJNN...TAXLO.R..NQVAK.............................
under the direction of hje.r... Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fulfillm ent of requirements of
the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H IL O S O P H Y
Date.
ATIO N CO M M UTE! DIS:
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ........................................ 1
I. CELTIC SURREALISM ............................. 10
II. THE TRANSCENDENTAL SCOT........................ 61
III. DIONYSIAN MAN..................................94
IV. EAST-WEST SYNTHESIS ......................... 124
CONCLUSION.........................................137
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY............................... 142
BIBLIOGRAPHY: KENNETH WHITE........................I1 *1 *
CURRICULUM VITAE: KENNETH WHITE .................... 148
INTRODUCTION
It will indeed be worthwhile to
investigate the relations between
initiation and the . . . most
creative expressions of a culture. . .
-Mircea Eliade, The Quest
As the title might obliquely suggest, this study moves
toward an understanding of the image of "whiteness" in
Kenneth White's poetry via the mythic and symbolic theme of
an initiation into creativity. Yet this image of "white
ness," I have discovered again and again, is quintessenti-
ally protean in nature and remains somehow indefinable,
despite the multiple definitions suggested in this study--
a perhaps necessary realization for grasping the possible
significance of the image for Kenneth White's poetry. It
seems to function as some type of magnetic "image center,"
in a manner much like that described by Hubert Benzoit in
"Theory and Practice of Detachment according to Zen":
In a general way, the relative harmonization of
a life • • . consists in the construction of a
world representation . . . which is harmoniously
convergent. The construction is made around an
an "image centre" to which the organism of the
subject "resonates" in a very consonant fashion
.... When an image centre is . . . animated
and the theoretical conceptions of the subject
approve this love . . . this centre exercises a
magnetic influence on the inner world which
Mircea Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in
Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19bSJ),
p " I 125.
1
attracts around it a growing number of psychic
elements. The image organizes around it, little
by little, the inner world in a positive way,
by a process of convergence or concentration
.... This process of crystallization is
accomplished more completely as the image centre
becomes more vast and as it is able to tie more
elements in this world together.2
"Whiteness" for Kenneth White seems to enact such a "harmo
nization of life" by means of converging numerous and
complex forces into one concentrated image--that of incan
descent whiteness. Instead of fighting the nature of this
image and hacking out some partial, fixed and sterile defi
nition of it in the course of this study, I have chosen to
highlight its many-sidedness, without trying to analyze too
closely when and why it stops functioning in one way and
starts functioning in another. That choice might reflect a
critical bias or conceal a fuzzy thinker, but to me it
signifies remaining faithful to what can be known without
forcing it into a highly conjectural, though consistent,
system.
As it stands, this study consists of four loosely-
connected essays on the poetry of Kenneth White, each
essay being situated within the context of some literary
period or source. These essays, too, are clustered around
the image of whiteness, in the sense William Carlos
Williams (from whom the title phrase "through to the white"
is borrowed) defines the term:
2--------------
as quoted by Kenneth White, "Open Letter to All
Hyperboreans," Raster (Autumn, 1970), p. 7.
2
A course in mathematics would not be wasted on
a poet, or a reader of poetry, if he remember no
more from it than the geometric principle of the
intersection of loci: from all angles lines con
verging and crossing establish points. He might
carry it further and say in his imagination that
apprehension perforates at places, through to
understanding— as white is at the intersection of
blue and green and yellow and red. It is this
white light that is the background of all good
work .... The difficult thing to realize is
that the thrust must go through to the white, at
least somewhere.3
As such, each essay symbolically represents a color--let us
playfully suggest that the Surrealism essay might be a
passionate red, the Transcendentalism one a leafy green,
Nietzsche, a panoramic blue, and Eastern literature, an
inscrutable yellow— all converging in "whiteness,” that is,
in the poetry of Kenneth White (hoping that it doesn't
result in a ”white-on-white” study, like the picture of the
white goose in the snowstorm). Although the study can be
seen as a progression in terms of Kenneth White's own
development (to be discussed shortly), each of the four
areas stands for whiteness or completeness in itself,
representing the area where "apprehension perforates . . .
through to understanding," as Williams says. It is perhaps
for their having gone "through to the white" themselves
that they have served as touchstones to White in his own
development; cind it is therefore within each of them that
White's poetry can achieve a type of "whiteness" of its own,
^William^Carlos Williams, The William Carlos Williams
Reader, ed. with intro, by M. LI Rosenthal (New York: New
Directions, Inc., 1966), pp. 385-86.
3
Each essay (except for the fourth, which only exists
in germinal form in the present study), by nature of being
a study of both a literary field and Kenneth White's
poetry, tends to reflect two types of literary criticism:
the first section, an exploration of the pertinent and
central literary forces in the fields of Surrealism,
Transcendentalism, and Nietzschean philosophy, remains in
essence a work of research, of concentrating and ordering
well-known ideas; the second section, perhaps more uneven
in texture because having fewer critical references on
which to base itself, actively explores the major ideas
mentioned in the first section as they are reflected in the
work of Kenneth White. The structure may seem somewhat
stylized, but hopefully, remains fruitful, casting new
light on both subjects. I have tried to center the discus
sion in each chapter around as many different texts of
Kenneth White's work as possible, to give the unfamiliar
reader an accurate idea of its range and scope.
The essays, it might be argued, are saying essen
tially the same thing in four different ways, each study
ing some aspect of a symbolic initiation motif which
finally penetrates through to creativity and whiteness.
Precisely. Four pairs of eyes instead of one focused on
any one thing, or one pair of eyes coming upon that thing
from four different angles, might reveal as nothing else
could the infinite complexity involved in any simple, and
central, idea, such as that of whiteness in this study.
No effort has been made to interrelate the essays, to tie
together the many similarities and cross-references they
suggest (e.g. , in their emphasis on analogical thought, on
supra-rational and intuitive modes of perception, on
Nature and naturalness, on life as a physical process, on
wholeness); such an activity would have completely altered
the nature of the study, turning it into something far
more systematic than was intended. The reader, hopefully
(there is a lot of "hope" here), can interrelate the
various motifs in some way meaningful to himself; and
perhaps later I will have the comprehensiveness of vision
to achieve the written task myself.
The essays have, however, been arranged in an order
which allows for a coherent appreciation of White's devel
opment as a poet, in a manner briefly outlined in the
following paragraphs.
The first chapter, "Celtic Surrealism," depicts the
poet's quest for origins, and serves as a general intro
duction to his poetry (which is one of the reasons why it
is longer than the other essays). This quest for origins,
which Mircea Eliade calls the "nostalgia for the . . . uni
versal matrix" (Quest, p. *+1), is characterized by a search
for mythic sources which can fecundate the creative imagi
nation. White's own source is in Celtic mythology, and his
movement through it involves first and foremost an
5
initiation, consisting in a "long and dramatic ’Quest’ for
marvelous objects involving, among other things, the hero's
entering the other world." (Eliade, Quest, p. 121) Eliade
adds:
. . . these initiatory motifs and symbols play an
essential role by their very presence, . . . they
partake of an imaginary universe, and this uni
verse is no less important for human existence
than the world of everyday life. (p. 121)
The Celtic "Quest" is picked up again in Surrealist litera
ture (particularly in the works of Andr6 Breton), with a
modern twist, as it tries to plumb the psychic and arche
typal depths of the sub-conscious, leading to its own brand
of "totality" in the individual. Eliade, again in The
Quest, comments:
. . . one deciphers in the early elan of
surrealism, and notably in the poems and
theoretical manifestoes of Andr£ Breton, a
nostalgia for the "primordial totality,"
the desire to effect in concreto the coinci
dence of opposites, the hopeof being able
to annul history in order to begin anew
with the original power and purity ....
(p. 65)
The second chapter, entitled "The Transcendental Scot,"
in some ways continues to develop ideas suggested in the
first, for here we have the quest of the "American Adam,"
as he moves across "virgin soil." Our concern is less with
the continuation of the myth, however, than with what the
Transcendentalists did once they had it, and how that
process represents a further development in White's poetry.
The theme of a basic and indivisible duality between man
6
and Nature, or body and mind, latently present throughout
the study, is here confronted and resolved in White's
poetry into a kind of ars poetica, which rests firmly on
the bedrock of the natural (or phenomenal) world. Thus
White, enriched by his search for origins, now attempts to
avoid parallax and to achieve wholeness once again by
grounding himself in the Transcendentalist point of view.
With the "Dionysian Man" in chapter three, White tries
to bring the transcendental into the self, into creative
egoism and self-energy. The whole moral and pietistic
structure of religion, which Emerson had used as a justifi
cation for his conception of the individual, is here
categorically denied by Nietzsche, who nevertheless works
to establish a "naturalism" which can exist without divine
sanctions; White himself calls this process one of
"learning to live in the whiteness naked." The possible
social implications and insertions of this Nietzschean
naturalism are touched upon in terms of White's conception
of a "creative university" within a "real culture."
Nietzsche's "Dbermensch" suggested the shamanistic
goals of the poet. Chapter four, which functions in this
study only as a brief projection on the subject, traces a
few of the developing tendencies in the vast field of
Eastern literature of some of White's most recent work:
Dionysus, for example, has become Shiva, who dances during
the infinitely recurring cycle of transmigration; the last
7
trappings of the Nietzschean • ’elitist” man are discarded in
favor of the “ordinary” perceptions of the oriental sage.
Ego is transformed into eros, in part through Tantric sex
practices, and perception as knowledge (exemplified in the
best of haiku poetry) is broadened to include perception as
erotic knowledge. The "Thou are That” of Hindu metaphysics
allows once again for union between the self (pruned of the
last vestiges of idealism left in Nietzsche's "overman")
and the cosmos. Unfortunately, the scope of the present
study allows for only a brief glimpse into this fascinating
field.
At every step in White's development as a poet, it is
apparent that he has absorbed and converted into a personal
myth some feature essential to his growth. This study by
no means attempts to de-mythify any aspect of his work.
Rather it tries to revivify the myth by evoking, in a
desacrilized world, those elements of the sacred which the
poet has reconstituted into new forms. "Whiteness" and
Kenneth White's "White World" hold both sacred and mythic
significance for him, and work as parts of an image center
which, as this interpretation hopes to show, creates ever-
widening circumferences of meaning for itself.
We conclude with this relevant statement by Mircea
Eliade who, suggesting guidelines for an approach to the
study of religions, cites (as an example of how a myth may
be approached) the ancient myth of the man who considers
8
himself to be the "Center of the World" (to which White’s
"White World" may be viewed as a modern corollary); this
study adopts such an approach as its own raison d’Stre:
... it is only by taking this belief seriously,
by trying to clarify all its cosmological, ritual,
and social implications, that one succeeds in
comprehending the existential situation of a man
who believes that he is at the Center of the
World. All his behavior, his understanding of
the world, the values he accords to life and to
his own existence, arise and become articulated
in a "system" on the basis of this belief that
his house or his village is situated near the
axis mundi. (The Quest, p. 69)
9
I. CELTIC SURREALISM
Enfant de la Bretagne, les landes me
plaisent. Leur fleur d'indigence est
la seule qui ne se soit pas fan€e k
ma boutonniere.
-Chateaubriand
Je participe aussi de ces landes; elles
m’ont souvent dechire mais j'aime cette
lumi&re de feux follets qu'elles entre-
tiennent dans mon coeur. Dans la mesure
oil cette lumiere m'est parvenue, j'ai
fait ce qu'il £tait en mon pouvoir pour
la transmettre .... A mes yeux il y
allait par Ik de mes chances de ne pas
demeriter de l'aventure humaine.
-Andr6 Breton , Entretiens
with Andre Parinaud, 195 2
i.
Andre Breton, in an introductory essay to Jean Mar-
kale’s classic translations of the Welsh bards from Gaelic
into French, takes issue with the mentality of modern
society, which he says promulgates "clarte" (in the sense
oi "elucidation") to the exclusion of "lumiere" (connoting
"illumination"); the latter, Breton affirms, is the real
i
sap, or pith ("s&ve") of language. One of the conse
quences of this deficiency in the individual is a withering
of language, another, that of sensibility. By default of
^Les Grands Bardes Gallois, tr. by Jean Markale, with
an introductory essay by Andrfc Breton, "Braise au tripied
de Keridwen" (Paris: Falaize, 1956), p. 7. Quotations
from Celtic poetry throughout this chapter are taken from
this French translation.
10
proper preparation this "lumifere venant de loin” can barely
be perceived by us, and those who cannot see it at all
settle for ”1'ersatz dans une banale et illusoire clart£."
(p. 7) In this same essay, Breton continues to evoke the
motifs of criticism and the need to revolt:
La revolution po&tique, qui culmina de nos jours,
a d£s maintenant pour consequence de faire
apparaitre le caractfere fallacieux des modes
d’apprehension . . . "i la lettre” d'un langage
n’ayant pas encore abdique ou aspirant & recon-
querir sa destination premiere. II convient de
leur opposer tout ce qui peut Stre d^veloppe
dans le sens d'une plus grande perm£abilitl d
ce qui en emane et cela par la vertu de 1'intu
ition et de la perception par analogie. C'est
seulement & partir de IS qu'une critique valable
peut se faire jour, accedant enfin au symbolisme
complexe qui, I l'insu de son auteur, forme la
trame du po&me, de la solidite et de la finesse
de laquelle depend, en derni&re analyse, sa force
d'impregnation .... (pp. 8-9)
The search is for a permeable language ”de l'Sme pour l'Sme
. . . de la pens£e accrochant la pens£e et tirant,” and,
according to Breton, the access to it is intuition and
perception by analogy, half-truths which anticipate and
excite knowledge for the whole. Cp. 9 ) Looking for this
"unfurled” language, one travels ultimately to the roots of
a civilisation for the "harmonizing key." In Breton’s case
it was an occasion for rejoicing when he discovered Celtic
art and literature in the early 1950's; it was an occasion
to discern the identity of his atavistic father, to learn
how he thought before the law of "survival of the fittest"
imposed its force upon him and before the "Greco-Latin yoke
11
brought its weight down upon him." (pp. 9-10)
What did Breton appreciate in Celtic art? Still in
the same essay, he quotes Lancelot Lengyel who in his book,
L’Art Gaulois dans les Medailles, interprets Celtic art as
being one opposed to the Greek conception of a terrestrial
beauty; it pursues an eternal and imperishable reality that
is hidden behind the appearances, without losing itself at
any time in the clouds of the unreal, (p. 10) Less Platon-
istic in tone, Breton himself adds,
Cette podsie od "Je" est d6ji intens&nent "un autre"
puisqu'il assume toutes les exigences, y compris
celle de l'inaniml et n'accepte de se concevoir
que comme leur conscience globale. Toute tendue
vers la resolution des 6nigmes de l’univers, elle
partage avec celle des Kenningar irlandais le don
de susciter en nous cette Mperplexit£-lucide" dont
nous parle Jorge-Luis Borges .... Cp. 11)
In calling up the spirit of Rimbaud ("'Je1 est un autre"),
Breton has already very clearly interpreted the connection
of Celticism and Surrealism.
Very few of the ancient documents of Welsh literature
remain today, and most of those extant have been tempered
by the mentality of the Middle Ages. We can only "suppose*”
Breton says, what their "idSes-forces" must have been,
through the fragments of the ancient Britannic Cor kym-
rique) poetry of bards such as Aneurin, Llywarch-Hen,
Myrddin, and especially Taliesin, (p. 11)
Kenneth White, a Scottish poet, or rather, a poet born
in Scotland, has, like Breton, also affirmed his Celtic
12
origins and the influence of Celtic thought on his own. Of
two French writers with whom he has "affinities," White
states, in an essay written in French:
Victor Hugo: Si, comme je le crois, il n'y a pas
d*influence sans ressemblance, c'est peut-§tre
celtique— (on se rappellera que la m&re de Hugo
6tait Bretonne)— si je puis employer un mot dont
on a tant abuses, que m'a attirS Victor Hugo, lui
qui, dans les pierres de Guernesey, voyait "la
sombre enigme celtique Sparse sous ses formes
diverses."
("AffinitSs Electives,"
unpublished essay, 196*1,
p.l)
Michel de Montaigne: Selon Elie Faure, ce serait,
en Occident, des esprits d’origine celtique qui
seraient les premiers (par protestantisme juste-
ment) & d£truire les grandes illusions collectives,
et les premiers aussi (par ce que j'appellerai leurs
surrealisme) £ creer une nouvelle mystique, ou,
plus sceptiquement peut-Stre, une fiction vitale.
Or pour lui, Montaigne, natif de cette province de
l'extrfime Occident que les Romains appelaient la
Celtib^rie, est celte. Aurais-je 6t£, moi natif
d'une province celtique encore plus extreme, attire
vers Montaigne par des affinit^s Electives presque
atavistes? (p. 9)
In the prose section of his book En toute candeur (trans
lated into French by Pierre Leyris)— entitled "Le monde
blanc"— White writes, "Les Vikings et les Celtes, gens
impersonnels, 4l6mentaires, voilS mes ancStres." He con
tinues :
Mon monde est un monde pr6-chr£tien, un monde froid
de la froideur de l'aube. Mes conceptions, je
crois, sont celtiques— nous ne savons plus gu&re,
en dehors de la po£sie, ce que cela signifie. Si
nous parvenions vraiment & savoir ce qu'£tait la
civilisation celtique, et ce qu’£tait la civili
sation hyperborSenne dont la civilisation celtique
faisait partie, nous aurions sans doute cette
"patrie de 1*esprit" qui nous fait tant d^faut. (p.58)
13
Even more pertinent to the subject matter of this chapter,
White writes concerning himself and Breton: "The relation
ship between us goes ultimately back to Celticism . . .
(unpublished letter of March * ♦ , 1970)
Both White and Breton see profound importance for
themselves and the modern world in the culture called
"Celtic": Breton, gravitating center of the Surrealist
movement initiated in France in the 1920's; and White,
self-exile from Scotland, born in 1936, living mostly in
France since 195 9 (which country he says has a "feminine"
temperament), who steeped himself long and deeply in
Surrealist thought, especially during the years from 195 9-
1966. The ties from Celticism to Surrealism to Kenneth
White are there, but like the world of the surreal, they
lie beyond appearances, which is where we must go in order
to perceive them.
But first, the crucial questions "Who are the Celts,
and what do they represent?" need to be answered if we are
to trace Celticism through Surrealism to Kenneth White, and
for that we must go back about twenty-five hundred years
in European history.
l*f
1'Inspiration qua je chant*,
je l'apporte des profondeura
-Taliesin (sixth century)
ii.
No one knows precisely from where the Celts came when
they first invaded Eastern Europe, as early as the tenth
century B.C. Perhaps they were of Slavic, Chinese, or
even— as Kenneth White mythopoeically views them— of Hyper
borean origin. At the time of their great expansion into
Western Europe, around the fifth century B.C., they were a
warlike people, physically characterized as being tall,
2
blue or grey-eyed, and often fair-headed.
Just prior to the Christian era, Julius Caesar began
his legendary conquest of Saul; against his technical
cunning and relentless calculations, the Celts were for all
practical purpose defenseless. Non-systematic and anarchic
by nature (traits which Kenneth White views as assets),
they were repeatedly unable to unite their proud and dis
parate tribes into the type of concentrated war-machine
that could have blocked the Roman advance. The history of
their resistance, which was to last well over five hundred
years, is filled with their aspirations for a "chef
supreme," a "roi du monde," but the nearest they ever came
was with their leader Veroing6torix, who was himself
----- 5----------------
Jean Marx, Les Literatures celtiques (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de FranceV i9^7), p. 5.
15
destined to become part of the long cortege of Celtic
3
heroes of lost causes.
After Caesar and the Romans came the Saxon invasions,
pushing the remaining unassimilated Celts further and
further into the extremities of Europe— the Iberian penin
sula, Brittany, Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Then followed
the repeated Viking "purges” of Ireland and Wales, until
the clamours of resistance finally dimmed to a murmur.
With this diminution disappeared the greatest part of the
Celts’ unique literature and culture, either wiped out
through the destruction of manuscripts, for the literature,
or integrated beyond recognition into that of the con
querors, for the culture. Tiny portions of both literature
and culture remained in the form of hermetic, underground
cults throughout the Celtic territories (literally "under
ground" in Ireland with the Celtic tribe known as the
Tuthua D6 Danann, who retreated to live in secluded
burrows, and who are the ancestors of the Irish "lepre
chauns") .
From each of the strongholds of Celtic culture we
have a few manuscripts dating as far back as the seventh
century A.D.: from Scotland comes the main manuscript, the
Leinster or Ossianic Cycle, with its hero Finn, and his
3Jean Markale, Les Celtes (Paris: Payot, 1969),
pp. 151-58.
16
4
son Oisin; from Ireland, the Ulster Cycle, whose hero is
Cuchulainn and whose king, Conchobar; as well as the Tain,
the Irish epic, whose hero is Fergus MacRoig; from Wales,
Four Ancient Books of Wales (poems) and the collection of
books known as the Mabinogion, the king of the tales being
Urien Rheged, and his son, Owein, prototype for Geoffroy de
Monmouth's King Arthur in his twelfth century account of
the tale (Historia regum Britanniae). The Britons possess
a nineteenth century collection of ancient tales known as
the Barzaz Breiz. (Marx, passim)
As a people, the Celts were highly imaginative and
possessed a quality, commented upon again and again by
scholars, and most frequently characterized by the word
"audacity"— a trait Kenneth White himself finds inseparable
from their spirit: they were given to excesses of all
types, often daring what others feared to dream of. This is
especially salient in the realm of their already highly-
sensitized imaginations. Anarchists, as already mentioned
with reference to Caesar, the Celts were fiercely indepen
dent, which frequently led to their unique and original
approaches to previously unquestioned matters; for example
in the Christian doctrine, as the Celts interpreted it,
there was no such thing as original sin. God's grace was
----- j - ----------------
Although this manuscript was discovered to be fraudu
lent, it has since been accepted into the Celtic canon, due
to the verve and insight of its style, which is Celtic in
spirit, and to the fact that MacPherson had incorporated
many valid Celtic texts into it.
17
his natural gift to man. Human will, they believed, is
capable of all, and evil, the negation of good, is its own
punishment. Happiness is knowledge of the truth, and
cannot be attained through evil means.
The druids or magicians were the predecessors of the
Celtic bards, or fili, and it is significant for our com
parisons with Kenneth White that in early times poetry was
the first medicine and the poet himself a visionary, cap
able of seeing into a world beyond the understanding of
most, and initiated into carefully guarded secrets and
magic rituals. Celtic literature, notes Jean Marx, was
"the work of a professional caste formed by exemplary
training and testing, and was destined for the pleasure of
an aristocratic feudality." (p. 122) The Welsh bard,
interestingly, called his work "cerdd da fed," which means
"art of language", and the term "art" in Welsh means "art"
(poetry) as well as "the artisan" (poet): thus, a creation
was both the poet and his art. (Marx, p. 8 0) The oldest
remaining Celtic poetry has neither rhythm nor rhyme; it is
based on alliteration. As the poetic technique developed,
rhythm first was added, then rhyme, until Celtic poetry
evolved into one of the most technically elaborate and
flamboyant representations of any language. (Marx, p. 69)
The harp was the bard's inseparable companion.
Concerning the language and technical aspects of
Celtic poetry, which will give us some ideas of how the
18
Celts put their imaginations into action, Kurt Wittig tells
us of the Gaelic branch that "... few languages are so
richly poetical as Gaelic, with its immense vocabulary,
sensuous precision, and subtle modes of expression." He
adds,
. . . but if the reader's own conceptions of poetry
are based chiefly on a study of West European litera
ture, his dominant impression may well be that their
poems have no organic structure— no plot, no exposi
tion, no climax, and no moral content . . . nothing
indeed, that would have needed a sustained effort
and an underlying intellectual system. But Gaelic
poetry has its own principles of composition— that
is why it is in some respects so different from
European, or from classical, poetry-jand its lack
of structure is often only apparent.
The Gaelic technique— which we will see often becomes
Kenneth White's technique as well— usually involved a
turning round and round of a subject to see it from all
angles, exhausting all its possibilities, the ultimate aim
being completeness and clarity of detail. Such poetry
reveals an intimate knowledge of the subject, which usually
was part of the poet's immediate surroundings, and bears
the marks of an accomplished technique. The syntax is
mainly substantival, with paratactic sentence structure
(often whole series of images linked only by the word
"agus"— "and"— there being no other conjunction used in
Gaelic poetry and no commas). The poetry is distinguished
by subtle impressionistic plays of light and movement with
Kurt Wittig, The Scottish Tradition in Literature
(Edinburgh and London! Oliver ancl Boyd, 1958) , p^ 18ft.
19
frequent color imagery (cf. such images as "foam-white
rowing"), involving the use of many adjectives and descrip
tive epithets.^
One especially remarkable feature which is crucial for
our purposes of comparing their poetry to Surrealist
writing is in what Wittig calls the "Gaelic metaphor" or
"flashing-together," where a bride, for example, may be
compared successively to a sapling and a sea-trout with
perfect equanimity, evoking the qualities of suppleness,
sweetness, whiteness, and making up a total impression of
the woman while still suggesting something else loved for
itself. (Wittig, p. 190) Wittig remarks: "To call this
comparison or metaphor does not fully do justice to it: it
is better described as a flashing-together of two pictures,
the more concrete one giving substance to the less tangi
ble." (Wittig, p. 190) This paratactic imagery, or
"flashing-together," Wittig tells us, serves the poet as a
means of obliterating the "line between animate beings and
inanimate objects." Wittig adds, "the extent to which this
is done in Gaelic poetry is remarkable." (p. 192) "Nature,»
Wittig continues, "is valued solely because of the aesthe
tic delight which it affords; there is no philosophical
6
Cf., Gu tarrgheal ballbhreac bdtainneach
sgisthach draimfhionn srbinfhionn guailleach
Translated, this description of calves is as "bright-
bellied, spot-speckled, stout-legged, white-flanked, white-
backed, white-nosed, high-shouldered." (Wittig, pp. 188-
89) We might also mention here that Gerard Manly Hopkins
was an impassioned scholar of Gaelic poetic techniques.
20
reflexion on it, no pantheism." (Wittig, p. 19 2) The
Gaelic poet often describes nature with such absorption
that "his own personality is dropped entirely out of view."
(Wittig, p. 192)
A propensity for the grotesque, and especially gro
tesque exaggeration, is also a quality which Wittig
ascribes to Celtic literature. "This," he says, "is the
outcome of a reckless irreverence, an eldritch imaginative
propensity that may run away with the poet . . . ; often,
too, it may involve him in violent rebellion against any
merely conventional moral and religious orthodoxy."
(Wittig, p. 71)
Beyond the technical aspects of their poetry lie the
incomparable Celtic myths, to which Kenneth White turned in
his search for origins, and which we now turn, to disengage
their major thrust.
"La grande force des Celtes a £te et reste toujours le
Mythe," Markale writes in Les Celtes (p. 7)— not in the
Christian sense of myth as "fabulous," illusion or false
hood, but as a reality in itself. The myth served the
Celts as the supreme means of unifying the material world
with the world beyond appearances (the Au-dell), a world
whose existence their vivid imaginations constantly reaf
firmed. Of this Celtic trait Markale writes: "II n’y a
pas d'exemple plus frappant de synthase harmonieuse entre
l1 element imagir.aire et l’6l&nent de realite pure." (p. 7)
21
Never far from physical reality, they seemed to pass at
will into and out of their other-world, a magic world of
primal life forces existing as the necessary complement to
the physical world, not as its explanation, nor as does the
Platonic or even Christian world of abstract absolutes
where the physical is disdained. Because of such beliefs
and the myths which they engendered, many material objects
acquired for the Celts magical symbolic qualities, operat
ing as keys to the gates of passage: the magic cauldron,
enchanted weapons, sacred woods, the metamorphic signifi
cance of the boar, the wolf, the crow or the seagull,
represent only a few examples of these "keys” which enjoy
7
dual realities.
The Celts waged what Morvan LeBesque calls a "white
0
war" with life; theirs was a long campaign in quest of
comprehension of the entire world (cf. com-prendre in the
etymological sense of to "take with"), not to separate its
parts but to create of them one unity. To do this they
lacked only a religion (i.e. , religare, from relier, "to
bring together"), which their myths were to provide. The
other-world, of course, being that of the Earth-Mother of
primal, creative forces, living men were needed for its
"n
Kenneth White, as we shall see, adopts some of these
same symbols in his poetry, particularly that of the sea
gull , which often becomes a symbol of his poetry and its
ability to open the gates to imaginative reality.
Q
Morvan LeBesque, Comment peut-on_8tre Breton? (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1970) , p. 208. "
22
total fecundation. (Markale, Celtes, p. 43) Many Celtic
heroes, like the Briton hero Conan Meriadek, enter, if only
for a short time, a world inhabited uniquely by women, who
are actually divinities. The universe created through the
fecondation of this feminine world by the men who search it
or who sometimes are lured to it by the f£es, becomes their
common creation. (Markale, Celtes, p. 2 90)
Many Celtic myths, and most notably those which
Kenneth White evokes in his poetry, take on the coloration
of this desire for involution, or return to the womb, and
represent in fact a myth of origins, of the trauma of the
original assechement. The theme of the "sterile country"
is that of the country lacking the mutual enrichment
provided by the feminine principle; the quests (including
that for the Holy Grail, which is Celtic in origin) involve
finding once again this magic, life-giving other-world,
temporarily lost because of some evil enchantment, and
regained by feats of superhuman prowess. (Markale, Celtes,
p. 35)9
The desire for occultation present in many Celtic
myths reflects a tendency of all primitive civilizations,
wherein science was reserved for the initiated. Poetry,
too, as Kenneth White and the Surrealists understand it,
Q
Cf. Kenneth White who writes in "Les collines matri-
cielles"* of En toute candeur: "Les Celtes, S moins que ce
ne soient les pre-Celtes, sont toujours en qufite d'un monde
de la femme." (p. 2 3)
23
partakes of the same types of camouflage. Markale writes
of this trait of Celtic poetry:
II s'agit avant tout, pour le poete, de passer du
nom de l'objet, par superpositions successives, £
celui d'un autre objet fort £loign£. Cette pra
tique, qui est evidemment surr£aliste, n’en est
pas moins fort ancienne .... (Celtes, pp. 200-
201)
Through the same sort of alchemical metamorphosis—
and the Celts knew something about alchemy— the Celtic
poet tried to sacrifice himself (i.e., sacrum facere,
"to render sacred"), to purify himself by slow psychic
transformations, arriving finally at a divine plane, which,
when considered cosmically, simulated once again the act of
regeneration. He is thereby able to identify himself spon
taneously with every particle of the cosmos. (Markale,
Celtes , p. 360)^
The principle, in every instance, is dynamic, and the
rg------------
Compare this Whitmanesque extract by the Gaelic poet
Air.ergein, reflecting both the metamorphosis cf the poet and
the cosmic identification which results:
Je suis le vent qui souffle sur la mer,
je suis vague de la mer,
je suis mugissement de la mer,
je suis le boeuf aux sept combats,
je suis oiseau de proie sur la falaise,
je suis rayon de soleil,
je suis navigateur intelligent,
je suis un sanglier cruel,
je suis lac dans la plaine,
je suis parole de science,
je suis une epee aigu£ menajar.t une armee,
je suis le dieu qui donne le feu i la t§te,
je suis celui qui jette la lumi6re entre les montagnes,
je suis celui qui annonce les ftges de la lune,
je suis celui qui enseigne oil se couche le soleil
(Markale, Celtes, pp. 189-190)
24
quality of mind it reveals is one which once again opposes
itself to the Hellenic tradition: all ii'»es within the
living movement--and the desire to follow that movement to
its natural culmination: movement of the creator, the
created, and the medium which intertwines the two. The
Celtic method involved an interiorized dialectic, which, if
it was successful, united the self with the imaginative
world by the very process of its movement from pole to
pole.
In the way of summation, the following quotation from
Markale's Les Celtes serves well to tie together the major
ideas which make up the Celtic surreal, and which tie it to
our study of Kenneth White--the quest for unity, the com
pensation through mythification, which transformed defeat
into victory, and the final occultization of the culture in
order to await the time and place for its re-emergence:
Les Bretons, comme les autres Celtes, ont toujours et&
£ la recherche de 1’Unit6, mais ce fut toujours une
recherche theorique, car jamais ils ne purent la
realiser materiellement .... D'autre part, l'affa-
bulation, ou mieux, la mythification, etant le propre
de 1'esprit celtique, ils1est produit une sorte de
phenomene de reversibility ou de transfert: tout ce
qui etait defaite s’est transform^ en une aventure
merveilleuse oil 1'ecroulement de la societe celtique
ne peut §tre dQ qu'S des circonstances plus ou moins
magiques. Ainsi se cr£e lentement le mythe du chef
supreme, du roi du monde, c'est-^-dire du roi du mi
lieu du monde, pour en revenir £ la notion d' omphal-
los .... (p. 253)11 ... la lumiere du heros
Everywhere the search for unity; the Celtic symbol
for wisdom is a circular snake with its tail in its mouth,
a symbol which might prompt a Freudian to write volumes.
25
. . . est occult6e: non seulement le dieu lui-m§me,
non seulement la notion de divinite, mais encore la
civilisation celtique tout entifere, qui n'a plus sa
place dans le monde actuel. C'est cette civilisa
tion qui reviendra un jour I la surface de la terre,
c'est cette civilisation qui, occultee d6lib€r€ment
par les derniers druides, n'attend que 1'occasion
favorable pour envahir le monde occidental. (p. 2 63)
L'oeuvre d'art, au mfime titre d'ailleurs que tel
fragment de la vie humaine consideree dans sa sig
nification la plus grave, me parait d€nu£e de valeur
si elle ne pr£sente pas la duret£, la rigidite, la
regularity, le lustre sur toutes ses faces ext£ri-
eures, interieures, du cristal .... Je ne cesse
pas . . . d'Stre porte & l'apologie de la creation,
de 1'action spontan£e et cela dans la mesure m§me
oil le cristal, par definition non ameliorable, en
est l'expression parfaite. Le maison que j'habite,
ma vie, ce que j'^cris: je rfive que cela apparisse
de loin comme apparaissent de pr£s ces cubes de sel
genune.
-A n d re Breton, 1*Amour fou
iii.
To approach Surrealism and the poetry of Kenneth
White through Celticism may lead us to view Surrealism
from an oblique angle, but an angle which is no less rele
vant for all that. The premises of all three are almost
identical.
The context in this section is that of Surrealism, but
the procedure involves a polarisation around the figure of
Andre Breton, who represents far more than any one other
individual among the Surrealist group its essence and its
26
norm, especially in what concerns the id^es-forces we are
trying to disengage.
There is no ground for supposing that Celticism
inspired Breton with themes and models for the Surrealist
movement. He became acquainted with Celtic art only in
195*4. But the parallels between Celticism and Surrealism
are all the more remarkable in that they existed indepen
dently of one another, and arrived at practically the same
results. This is perhaps a strong claim for the atavistic
theory, or at least in what concerns its workings in the
realm of the imagination: Breton spent his early child
hood in Brittany (at Saint-Brieuc in the C5tes-du-Nord,
from 1896 until 1900) and is himself, like Kenneth White,
12
of Celtic origin.
The Surrealist goal does in fact have very strong
affinities with the other-wordly quest of the Celts as well
as with the poetry of Kenneth White. In the periodical
Europe, which dedicated special studies to Surrealism in
its November and December issues of 1968, Franqoise Nann,
in an article entitled "Surr^alisme et merveilleux cel-
tique,” notes a strong affinity between Celtic mythology
and modern poetry:
Si la mythologie greque a constamment servi de
r£f6rence aux poetes, de Ronsard £ ChSnier, pourquoi
ne pas demander < 1 une autre mythologie de fournir
'-----------------------------
Philippe Audoin, Breton (Paris: Sallimard, 1970),
p. 100.
27
des images i la po€&ie moderne? La solidarity
entre le monde des viyants et 1'Autre Monde, qui
n'est pas le royaume des morts mais le pays de
printemps, est Lien i la base de la mythologie
celtique .... La communication entre les deux
est constante car ils ont besoin l'un de 1'autre;
elle se fait par l'intermldiaire des h£ros, requis
d'aller chercher les objets merveilleux qu'ils
obtlennent en ^change de grands risques ....
Des r&gles analogues ne definissent-elles pas les
rapports de la po£sie avec le po&te? Que le risque
couru par le h£ros celtique exige des qualit£s
presque surhumaines ne va pas & 1 'encontre des
aspirations surr^alistes. N'a-t-il pas sa trans
position dans le "long, immense et raisonn£
d£r&glement de tous les sens," et les images
rapport£es pa.r les voyants ne sont-elles pas les
£p£es, les coupes enchantles? Le po£me surgi au
moyen de l'^criture automatique n*est-il pas un
objet venu d'ailleurs, l'irruption du f£erique
dans le quotidien?
The poem, then, as art object, is the verbal expression of
a mission accomplished in the mind within unknown lands;
as such, the poem forms the bridge that joins the two
worlds, just as the myth accomplished the same task for
the Celts.
In a sense, as Julien Gracq has pointed out, Breton's
creations represent modern transfigurations of the grand
est of the Celtic motifs:
Ce que nous remet en m^moire cet itin6raire
hasardeux dont le but se d£robe sans cesse, mais
qui tout au long met aux prises Breton avec les
grandes figures symboliques, tour & tour exal-
tantes et glaqantes, du RSve incarn^, de 1'Amour
unique, du Chlteau PSrilleux Con songe ici k un
chapitre de 1'Amour fou), de la Femme-enfant
(Arcane 17), de la Gardienne du secret CNadja),
de la^ythie ("Lettre aux yoyantes"), nous ne
pouvons nous y m£prendre au ton de d£concertante
solennit£: c'est un des thfcmes ^piques les plus
anciennement traites qui soient, aussi bien dans
28
la mythologie grecque que dans les ge&tes du Moyen
Age: celui de la QuSte— qu€te de la Toison d'Or
ou qufite du Graal.13
Either through atavistic affinities or because men in
both cultures were working through the same problems,
Breton undertook in Surrealism the same permanent revolu
tion— of thought, in his case--which was an intellectual
manifestation of Celtic dynamism. The goal was to pene
trate the real, and in so doing to transfigure it, to make
it live beyond appearances, not within objects, where it
remained trapped, inert and static. (Markale, Celtes,
p. 470)
The Surrealist image, as defined by Pierre Reverdy,
bears a striking resemblance to the Celtic "flashing-
together” :
Plus les rapports des deux r€alit€s rapprochees
seront lointains et justes, plus l'image sera
forte— plus elle aura de puissance Emotive et
de reality po€tique. (Audoin, p. 15)
In the following verse from the poem "Conjuration Hostile"
by Taliesin (Welsh poet of the sixth century), note the
------jpr— ------------
Julien Gracq, Andre Breton (Paris: Librairie Jos£
Corti, 1948), p. 102.
Breton slightly qualified this definition by adding
that the Surrealist analogy, since only elucidating partial
realities (of an unknown totality), cannot be expresse3 in
terms oT~an equation: "Elle se meut," he wrote, "entre les
deux realit€s en presence, dans un sens determine, qui
n*est aucunement reversible. " (quoted by Audoin, p. 142)
Cf. Breton's definition ofthe imagination as "ce qui tend
se rgaliser." (underlinings are Breton's)
29
disparate quality of the animate and inanimate imagery and
its consequent "shock” value:
Une seconde fois j'ai ete cree,
j'ai ete un saumon bleu,
'ai £t£ un chien, j'ai un cerf,
'ai ete un chevreuil sur la montagne,
'ai ete un tronc, j'ai £te une bfiche,
'ai ete une hache dans la main,
'ai ete cheville de tenailles
(Markale, Bardes, p. 63)
as well as that same "flashing-together" in Breton's
"1'Union libre":
Ma femme aux aisselles de martre et de f§nes
De nuit de la Saint-Jean
De tro&ne et de nid de scalares
Aux bras d'ecume de mer et d'ecluse
Et de melange du ble et du moulin
The subjects of both poems are undergoing a slow transform
ation, a metamorphosis which is "rendering sacred" their
essence. The subjects attain cosmic proportions through
their identification with different elements of the uni
verse. Taliesin's poem retells the story of the successive
transfigurations he underwent before becoming Taliesin, the
poet; for Breton, woman, the Muse and mediator to the other
world, undergoes an alchemical transfiguration which unites
within herself the four elements of the terrestrial world--
"Aux yeux de niveau d'eau de niveau d'air de terre et de
* i t 15
feu."
-----rr-------------
Kenneth White, through the mediating power of the
feminine principle, also experiences this cosmic yet ele
mental transformation, but outside the field of Celtic
mythology; it is ultimately in Eastern literature that
White finds parallels for a similar metamorphosis (see the
poem "Mahamfldra" in chapter four).
30
In the Rimbaudian theme of "changer la vie," one of
the primary Surrealist efforts, which was to be of crucial
importance to Kenneth White, lay in a process which they
called "d6r£alisation" of the external world— that is, a
breaking of the logical connections between objects and the
16
interior of objects, between form and function. We must
learn to see objects outside of their functional proper
ties , and as images in themselves; we must let the imagina
tion play over the range of possibilities which the world’s
physical aspect provides, substitute the "pensable" for the
"pense," as Breton expressed it. Taliesin, with apparent
ease, had known how to do this when he wrote, "ma ceinture
est un arc-en-ciel enveloppant mes ennemis."(Markale,
Bardes, p. 93) The spontaneity for the Surrealists had to
be recaptured.
The ultimate goal was to get through to the other-
world and to carry back its secrets to this one, while at
the same time not forgetting the route, in order that a
continuous passage between the two worlds might become
possible.
Surrealism strove with all its energy to discover, as
Breton put it, a
. . . cl£ qui, capable d’ouvrir ind£finiment cette
boite & multiple fond .qui s'appelle l'homme, le
dissuade de faire demi-tour, pour des raisons de
Ferdinand AlquiS, Philosophie du suPrealisme
(Paris: Les Editions du Tamps, 1$63), p. Td*>.
31
conservation simple, quand il se heurte dans
1'ombre aux portes entidrement f erases de l'"au-
dell,” de la r€alit€, de la raison, du g€nie et
de 1'amour.I?
The need for an other-world was omni-present for the
Surrealists, but the means for its attainment were not.
They tried many different methods to achieve this pene
tration, among them psychoanalysis, hypnosis and automatic
writing. Concerning the latter method, Breton was con
vinced that it had pinpointed the "matifere premiere” of
language, in approximating more closely than anything else
"le fonctionnement r6el de la pens6e," although, as he
wrote,
... la pratique sincere de 1'automatisme exige
du scripteur une discipline d'esprit presque aussi
difficile k atteindre et & soutenir que le vide
mental des asc&ses orientales.
(quoted by Audoin, p. 131)
For the creation of art (and life, since Breton
seldom mentions one without somehow tying in the other),
Breton consistently stressed passion as the initial impe
tus. His method was to "aimer d'abord" to the degree that
— j i g - ■ — ---— —
The ancient Welsh had a term, Awenyddion, to des
cribe what they called "inspired people. Girard de Barry
in the twelfth century describes these inspired ones in
this way: "Ils ne r€pondent pas normalement aux questions
qu'on leur pose, mais tout i l coup ils sortent d'un sorte
d'extase comme d'un profond sommeil et ils r€pondent dans
un style qui leur est propre et qui d'ailleurs est orne.
Puis quand ils reviennent au sens commun, ils ont perdu la
memoire de leurs propos, comme s'ils ne s'exprimaient que
sous la pression d'esprits fanatiques. Leurs rfeyes les
inspirent, d'autres 6crivent comme sous la dict€e d'un
autre." (quoted by Marx, pp. 80-81) We are not far here
from the Surrealists, where a Robert Desnos pronounced as
his first words under hypnosis: "un ruban bleu, ma douce
vagabonde".'
32
there would occur a "resonance intime.” True to the
Celtic spirit, Breton insisted the movement be a dynamic,
convulsive one. In fact, if ever a poet has sung the
glory of love and exalted the world of the woman— from
Poisson Soluble in 1924 through Arcane 17 in 1945— it was
Breton. "Nous reduirons l'art S sa plus simple expres
sion,” Breton writes, "qui est 1'amour." (quoted by
Alqui6, p. 16)
Breton's love poems, more specifically, are poems to
the Muse, and in this respect, as we shall see, he differs
somewhat from Kenneth White; like the Celts, he felt that
woman, because more earth-rooted than man and participat
ing more deeply in the recurrent rituals of creation, was
a possible mediary to the other world. He called the type
of love he believed in "amour fou," a unique and devouring
19
love. Breton's poems, however, rather than being direct
poems to the Muse, reflect a kind of "ontological mutation"
in which the feminine element permeates the very substance
of the poems. In the process, the physical world is satur
ated with the feminine (i.e. , other-worldly) element, and
the spell of dryness and sterility is broken. This
------ arg---------------
Love to the Celts had an aura of fatality about it
as well. The woman often compelled the man to love her
against his will by use of a geis or taboo. Love was not
gentle, nor primarily physical! It became an unbridled
torrent which knew no restraint, was ferocious and abso
lute. Jean Marx tells us that "II y a li uh £rotisme
latent qui ne demande qu'*l s'exprimer avec le sang, car
tout est tragique, tout conduit i une mort violente." (p.
192) Cf. Tristan et Iseut.
ontological mutation places such poems of Breton's among
those of Celtic metamorphosis or alchemical purification
previously mentioned; the process involves a symbolic
movement upward. The exterior or real world is "de-
realised" when permeated with the magical feminine princi
ple formerly lacking, and the way is made possible into
further purification (or crystallization)» moving upward
finally into the realm of communication with the unified
whole.
Breton, who never denied the importance of love, came
to see it (in Arcane 17, for example) as one among other
necessary elements in his quest rather than as the Philoso-
20
pher's Stone itself. Quite often in his poetry one has
the impression that he is overwhelmed by the "permeated
physical" world to the degree that he would be fulfilled in
remaining forever in its flux, forever outside the "crystal
home" he describes, singing in his sylvan wilderness.
He did not, however, remain stationary. To critics
who accused him of building a metaphysical network, then
denying that it was metaphysical, Breton re-affirmed:
". . . l'au-delli surr^aliste ne peut se situer ni en dehors
de ce monde, ni apres le temps de notre vie." (quoted by
— fn —
In Arcane 17 we see that Breton is no longer search
ing for another world, because, in fact, he has found the
unxty he sought. His preoccupation consists here in solid
ifying its elements into something crystalline. "L'amour
fou" is part of this process, leading to an "6tat de
grtce," as expressed in Arcane 17 (Paris: Union G^nlrale
d'Editions, 1965), p. 28.
34
Alqui£, p. 116) The real aim was not to establish an other
worldly existence, but to effect a unity between the world
beyond appearances and the material world, a unity, for
Breton, possessing all the qualities of crystal.
In the quest for unity, Breton declared himself the
enemy of anyone who perpetuated the division of man against
21
himself. His predilection for cabalistic, alchemical and
hermetic writings allowed for one of the means through
which he sought to unify man with himself and with his uni-
22
verse. In the First Manifesto of Surrealism in 192H the
Orient (cradle of esoterism) is mentioned frequently, but
becomes an even more insistent motif in the Second Mani
festo (1930), wherein esoterism may aid in the concentra
tion into "one supreme point" of the mind, where "la vie et
la mort, le reel et 1'imaginaire, le pass€ et le future, le
communicable et 1’incommunicable cessent d'Stre pergus
contradictoirement." (quoted by Crastre, Drame, p. 11*0
Breton's esoteric probings were for him a means for a
"recuperation totale de notre force psychique." (quoted by
Crastre, Drame, p. 115)
— — nrr —---------------
Surrealist interest in Hegel was no accident.
22
Crastre tells us, "Breton pense et s'exprime en
mystique chaque fois qu'il s'abandonne k la pente naturelle
de sa pensee." (Drame, p. 110) Crastre relates Breton's
"erotic esoterism" to the spirit of the Middle Ages, where
scientists and thinkers appreciated the mystery of the uni
verse without letting it interfere--on the contrary— enrich
ing., the logic of their thought.
35
"L'amour, la revolution, la po6sie," these were the
Surrealist touchstones which Breton hoped would lead to
unity. Revolt, he felt, was useless unless it led to a
Revolution. As a "literary movement" (even though the
Surrealists fought such a designation) the movement by it
self was incapable of bringing about this revolution. It
23
required active involvement on the political scene. The
Surrealists' cooperation with members of the Communist
party from 1925 until approximately 1933, when Breton
formally withdrew, although others, like Aragon and Eluard,
remained, represented to them the unique outlet in present
society for arriving at a practicable solution. Yet the
collaboration was ultimately a failure, since, as Victor
Crastre writes, "... pens£e communiste et pensee sur-
realiste pouvait se juxtaposer, mais . . . elles etaient
aussi impuissantes k se fondre dans une ideologic commune
que l’huile et l'eau I former un liquide nouveau." (Drame,
pp. 76-77) The conviction was that a new world could be
formed only after a Revolution, and tied Communism and Sur
realism together; but the other touchstones of Surrealism,
Love and Poetry, were categorically negated by the Commun
ists. To Breton, this was a negation of the unity of the
51— : ----------
White, on the other hand, is not political m the
same sense, although he probably does embrace the Surreal
ist trinity as his own; revolution for him involves a
cultural change, beginning in the universities (see chap
ter three for discussion).
36
individual he was seeking above all else.
Although, practically ignored at the outset, interest
in Surrealist thought revived as World War II exploded.
Yet it has still to come into its own beyond a certain
fadism, even today. One wonders if this fact might be the
basis for seeing the Surrealist movement in general, and
the work of Andr€ Breton in particular, as a failure.
Victor Crastre, in what we may take as our answer to this
concern, writes in Andr£ Breton:
Quand on suit la marche de 1'auteur du Manifeste,
depuis 1'experience Dada jusqu'S ses toutes der-
nieres entreprises, on est surpris par le nombre et
par la gravite de ses €checs: 6ch.ec de Dada, echec
de presque toutes les tentatives du Surrealisme,
echec de 1'accord avec les communistes, etc. Mais,
d'6chec en echec, c'est finalament 1'image d'une
victoire qui se d€couyre. II semble mime <^ue le
mouvement qui est celui de son esprit n'a ete rendu
possible que par la situation dans le temps de ces
tehees. En effet, ceux-ci ont 6t6 la condition,
chaque fois, d'un succfcs sur un point opposi (dans
l'espace) du domaine oil Breton a choisi d'operer.
(pp. 6*1-65)
Like the Celts, Breton has gained a victory on the imagina
tive plane, through symbolic representation of his goals.
The phenomenon of reversibiliti described by Jean Markale
in the case of the Celts once again operates for Breton in
24
Arcane 17:
C'est IS, S cette minute poignante oil le poids des
souffranees enduries semble devoir tout engloutir,
que 1*excSs mime de l'ipreuve entraine un changernent
2" i | " ’ "
Seventeenth card of the Tarot, Arcane 17 symbolizes
the star, or hope.
37
de signe qui tend & faire passer 1'indisponible
humain 3u c6t6 du disponibie et i affecter ce
dernier d'une grandeur qu'il n'eflt pu se connaitre
sans cela*--c'est l£ que ces mots peuvent 6tre
pleinement entendus. II faut §tre all6 au fond de
la douleur humaine, en avoir d^couvert les Stranges
capacites, pour pouvoir saluer du mtme don sans
limites de soi-mftme ce qui yaut la peine de vivre.
(p. 107)25
With this reversibilite comes the crystallization
Breton sought, a "point lumineux" (p. 13) where "toutes les
lumi&res communiquent."Cp. 53) In the face of war, Breton
postulates the unifying values of "amour, art et po£sie."
In this book, the most lyrical of all Breton's prose, which
one could study eternally without exhausting its mysteries,
the real and surreal are reunited. One of the book's most
recurrent symbols, that of the Rocher Perc6 of Canada's
Gasp£ Peninsula, is held up as the affirmative symbol of
this life, lovingly penetrated from every angle, under all
conditions, until it unfolds to the author the ever-deepen
ing and widening dimensions of its significance: "A
1'observer plus distraitement du rivage," Breton writes at
the close of the chapter devoted almost exclusively to it,
"le Rocher Perce n'est aile que de ses oiseaux." (p. 57)
— -*r— 1 “
In 19**1 * World War II was at its peak; Breton had
also recently undergone some of the most painful experi
ences of his personal life, including diyorce and the
suicide of his young daughtecr, Aube.
38
The violence of poetry
is still
and goes deep—
to the bone
to the white
-Kenneth White
"Cape Breton Elegy"
iv.
Kenneth White's early Celticism, which was later to
develop along other channels, has been noted by more than
one observer. In the introduction to his translation of
White's first book of poems, Pierre Leyris calls White
. . un vrai barde gaelique . . . qui s'averait & la fois
26
immemorial et absoluraent moderne." Jean-Jacques Mayoux,
in his preface to Wild Coal, White's first book, had
already remarked on the resemblances:
Un lecteur qui, comme moi, a toujours eprouv6
tr£s fortement nos affinit4s celtiques, les
retrouve ici tres vigoureuses. Ignorant la
separation linguistique et autre du britannique
et du gaelique on croit parfois trouver un jeune
fr&re de Dylan Thomas au lyrisme malicieux,
parfois un dernier descendant de la tradition
de poesie gnomique et aphoristique des anciennes
Galles.27
Kenneth White, En toute candeur. Preface by Pierre
Leyris (Paris: Mercure de France,1964), p. 10. This book
consists of three essays translated into French, and the
poems of White's first book, Wild Coal, in bilingual
presentation.
27
Kenneth White, Wild Coal. Preface by Jean-Jacques
Mayoux (Paris: Club d e s . ' Etudiants d'anglais, 1863), pp.
7-8.
39
Mayoux also comments on White's Celtic attributes of
"irreverence,” "valliance” and "resilience,” noting at the
same time the ancient Celtic affinities with the East,
which we find once again in White's poetry, (p. 8)
If by Celticism we can understand a closeness to and
acute perception of nature, a simplicity (i.e., a concen
trated complexity, a sense of fundamental unity), and a
primitivism, White is a Celtic poet. The above character
istics also make him a modern embodiment of Schiller's
"simple poet” who rejects society's models:
2 8
Civilisation has become a danse macabre,
and again:
Civilisation is a refusal of the earth; by this
refusal, it warps the very ground of existence.
(Candeur, p. 31)
Any such wholehearted rejection of civilisation by the poet
implies that civilisation's mutual rejection of the "rene
gade” (excluding a possible "recuperation” of the poet by
society once the poet is dead— or "de-fanged," as D.H.
Lawrence would say— and no longer fights back). The two
mutually repellent forces tend to avoid one another.
Society's literary critics, however, often feel the
urge to classify its aberrations, a fact which sidetracks
Kenneth White, "A la lisi&re du monde " C"At the
Edge of the World"), Les Lettres Nouyelles (Janyier-f6v-
rier, 1965), p. 5. I haye Acquired the original English
texts of Kenneth White's works quoted in this section, so
that although the original publication is listed in French
translation, it is quoted here in English.
*+0
us a moment for the purposes of picking a few bones—
critics’ bones. For example, in Michael Hamburger's book
The Truth of Poetry, White's poetry is characterized in the
following manner:
Kenneth. White shows little awareness of the greed
and cruelty of nature, or of the very great diffi
culties that arise in any attempt to derive models
for human existence from non-human nature alone.29
White's poetic vision implies a decision, one which White
himself has already made--that society is lethal, and that
nature, though dangerous, offers hope. The difficulty then
becomes, as Hamburger asserts, one of finding and inter
preting apt models, truths, foundations in nature, upon
which man can build. White himself has written concerning
the difficulties in this effort (in terms less pragmatic,
however, than that of "deriving models"):
Dante says that every being, by instinct, travels
to its destined harbour on the ocean of being.
But that ocean is an ocean of storm, I say, and
there are more shipwrecks than destinies. Even the
earth can lose its cohesion and the hearts of ani
mals can cease to beat. As for the mind of man . .
30
• •
In another article appearing in the Southern Review,
John Press writes of White:
His verse undoubtedly stands against the current of
the day, being neither ostentatiously tough and
— ' ■ o f l ’ “
Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry (.London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969),pp. 295-2^7.
30
Kenneth White, Letters from Sourgounel (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1966), jn 64.
41
brutal nor . . • academically decorous and correct.
Less sure-footed than Walker and Heaney, he is,
nonetheless, a poet of considerable power.3:1
Press designates White as "less sure-footed" than the other
two poets mentioned, but doesn't explore the reasons why
this may be so. Andre Breton, one of White's mentors, has
asked aptly and metaphorically of modern man in Arcane 17,
" . . . qui pourrait . . . se diriger autrement qu'ei tatons
dans ce brouillard?" The occasional diffidence in White's
stride may be in proportion to the difficulty of the voyage
he has undertaken; like Yeats, he knows "the fascination of
what's difficult."
A native of Scotland, White does not appear Scottish
except when he writes in dialect. His concerns are not
nationalist in any way, and, in the ranks of Scottish poets
(though any such ranking of poets according to mere nation
ality is more than a little doubtful, since the real
identities go deeper, and wider), he can only appear as an
32
outsider, if not a renegade. The schism with modern
TT
John Press, "Ted Walker, Seamus Heaney, and Kenneth
White: Three New Poets," Southern Review (July, 1969),
p. 685.
3 2
Yet Scot he unmistakably is; witness a certain tough
ness, a macabre humor, and a grotesque realism. And he is
Celt, in an absolutely unnostalgic, unsentimental, uncult-
ish way. With regard to Criticism, in addition to the
parallel already drawn between White and Breton in this
chapter, another useful one could be drawn with White and
Yictor Segalen (e.g., primitivism or primordialism, and
openings East).
42
English poetry is even more pronounced for White, for whom
3 3
"poetry means worldification." Writing of the New Lines
poetry written in England in the 1950's, White comments:
There is no world in this poetry Cor, if we
prefer it, no fundamental experience of the world),
only commentaries on an environment (post-war
Britain), and on the "private lives" that are
part of this environment. Technically, it is
good enough verse , with few obvious faults, but
with little or nothing of the power of poetry.
Ethically, it is full of the secondary moral
virtues, but is existentially flat.
("British Poetry," p. 7)
Real poetry for him is elsewhere.
The first book of White's poetry to appear in England
was The Cold Wind of Dawn, a collection of thirty-eight
poems, some of which had earlier appeared in Wild Coal and
Oh
En toute candeur. The book is divided into three main
parts, which correspond to the three prose sections of En
toute candeur: (1) "Virgin Territory," which correspond#
to "Les collines matricielles" in En toute candeur, (2)
"Zone," corresponding to "Les fournaises de la ville," and
(3) "Naked Ground," corresponding to "Le monde blanc." It
is to The Cold Wind of Dawn that we now turn to discover
there the id6es-forces of White's own poetry.
33Kenneth White, "British Poetry, 19.50-1969," Raster
(Winter, 1969), p. 17.
3^Kenneth White, The Cold Wind of Dawn (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1966).
•+ 3
"Precentor seagull" opens the first section of poems
and firmly sets the emphasis, as early as the first two
lines, on movement and a kind of elemental religion: "You
up there in the lurching church of the elements / mover and
moved"; Cp. 9) this interplay continues throughout the
poem. The invocation is for a sign from this "archangel of
language" (line fourteen)— "give us the sound at least the
note," (line nine) or an initiation— and is answered by the
creation of the poem itself, which involves the metamorpho
sis of the poet:
0 bird I see and hear
1 feel my body bending to your shape
your throat is mine
and look alive this bird-thing here of words
is struggling
into
flight
The religion evoked, clearly enough, is not of the usual
order. The church is the elements, the archangel of lang
uage is the seagull, and the divinity must of course be
the poetry created by the visitation, or else the poet,
made divine, who is himself the poem. Heretical by Christ
ian standards, there is nonetheless the strong expression
of a religious genesis expressed within these first poems,
which freely employ symbols from the Christian religion,
using them for their sacro-evocatiye, ritualistic qualities
rather than for their doctrinal oyertones. In "Morning
walk" (p. 12) one can envisage the original moments of
creation, wherein "the boy" of the poem is actually the
first sensuous companion of the "alone and lonely" earth:
It was a cold slow-moving mist
clotted round the sun, clinging
to the small white sun, and the earth
was alone and lonely, and a great bird
harshly squawked from the heronry
as the boy walked under the heeches
seeing the broken pale-blue shells 35
and the moist piles of mouldering leaves
The tone of these first poems resembles that of a pre
initiation state for the poet, where he is still a must
spectator and passive regarding the wonders surrounding
36
him. Yet he refuses to remain in this passive incompre
hension, and tries to force the gates of meaning leading to
the more-than-human, which open onto maybe heaven, maybe
hell, or both:
Now I shall take my boat again
and row out through the great rain
to the cold salt blaze of the sun
I shall rock out there in the loneliness
the silence that is no man's business
till the winds open and let me pass
to the sudden crying of a hundred gulls
("At the Great Gate," p. 17)
Still in 1he first section, "The winter of the world"
depicts a fundamental modification of the pre-initiation
45 " _
Carrying the comparison further, the poem "When
the frost came to the brambles" re-enacts the Garden of
Eden scene where the first gustatory sensations were awak
ened: "Red they were and black / and the bitter frost /
put tang into their sap." Cp. 11)
36
We needn't call the speaker's yoice the "person-
a" in White's poetry; in his poetry the persona is almost
always the poet, and what he feels he represents.
45
motif; already a perspective is forming, already the
strophe form and content reflect a kind of cyclic joy and
despair absent from the poems up to this point:
Winter the trees are weeping for cold
birds though bonnie their song is bleak
the sun itself a thin snare of light
kind knowledge is more than cunning
fire and a friend and food enough
the world of whiteness is sick and weary
stars are staring streets are stony
the making of music ends in misery
The final strophe ends
kindness remains though chaste and cold
misery ends in the making of music
Cp. 21)
Then the anguish of the search comes fully to conscious
ness: "what can this life to me in the burning days mean /
how can I intricately read / the flashing whiteness of the
birch-tree bark . . . ("Walking the earth," p. 23) In
this last poem of "Virgin Territory," the ascetic, elemen
tal yearnings of the poet find their full, though bleak,
expression in natural images:
lonely in naked desire I walk through the world
and the crying in my heart
is the blind chorus of seagulls before a storm
fleeing inwards
across the masonic township and the birch-tree wood
to the desolate moor
where they perch
on the blackened heather and granite rock
with cold eyes, staring
"Zone," the second group of poems in The Cold Wind of
Dawn, represents in fact trhe full initiation-by-fire, for
entering into it we plunge directly into the "Glasgow
46
furnaces." The poems in this section have probably
received greater critical acclaim and easier acceptance
(because more obviously realistic, empirical, and less "far
37
out") than any of White's other poetry. furthermore,
these poems show a highly refined technique and a total
mastery of subject matter; the influences of Dunbar and
Burns show clearly in the social satires. Several poems
are written in dialect (e.g., "Song about the uselessness
of life" and "Ballad of the C. 4 W."). The city, and the
squalor of human life which trails like refuse in its wake,
are crisply and lyrically evoked:
Sun a beetroot thrown in mud
six o'clock winter in Dumbarton Road
oatcakes and milk I buy at the dairy
as cars spit their way towards the ferry
("Zone," p. 35)
The city symbolizes at different moments both hell and
death: death, for those within it, in a poem like "Now in
this tomb," which closes (the "it*is the self):
convinced of hopeless importunity
it subsides in the region where no bird sings
where no rivers flow and no trees bloom
and thought is nothing but an unsealed tomb
(p. 27)
Or again, death as we see it in "Coffin Close," where life
is but the narrow passageway leading to it:
Have you heard of the Coffin Close, boys
have you heard of the Coffin Close
— 37_
E.g., Francis Scarfe, in the introduction to Wild
Coal, calls "The Coffin-Close" of this section a "master
piece. "
H7
it's one of life's rare joys, boys
it smells like a summer rose
yes, it smells like a summer rose
Have you ever fallen down the stair, boys
have you ever fallen down the stair
and buried your sensitive nose, boys
in the filtn. and j&uck which is there
yes, the filth and muck which is there
Have you ever seen Bill McNeice, boys
have you ever seen Bill McNeice
lying dead to the world, boys
and a cat being sick in his face
yes, a cat being sick in his face
I live in the Coffin Close, boys
I live in the Coffin Close
very soon they'll be taking me out, boys
and my head will come after my toes
yes, my head will come after my toes
(p. 29)
Glasgow is also hell. "Before any real going forward
is possible," White writes in a prose section of En toute
candeur, "we have to go down." (p. 30) Glasgow, the
"civilised" mother from whose "rusty womb" ("Zone") the
poet came, represents the nadir of the point White seeks:
The broad streets of this town, when the sky is
pinched with cold, or when the drizzle seeps through
the fog, or when the red circular object above your
head reminds you of the sun, are hell pure and simple.
Here also are all my fathers. Here I plunge into
the past which is also the present— into birth,
copulation and death, as the man said.
(Candeur, p. 53)
As such Glasgow remains a symbol, an inspiration and a fun
damental point of reference. "All my writing echoes in
the womb of Glasgow," White writes in Letters from Gour-
gounel: "Even in the house of the sun, I do not forget
it ... . It is the delight of the throes of birth, the
* + 8
bloodiest adventure a man goes through.* " Cp. 5 9)
Yet hell's boundaries spread far beyond the confines
of Glasgow for White, far out over the whole sterile and
exiled modern world, Hiroshima's child. "At the Edge of
the World," an essay published in Leg Lettres Nouvelles in
French translation, further illustrates White's devastating
perception of an absurd modern reality, his instinctive
revolt against it, and gives the first clues to his means
of deliverance from it.
White opens the essay with an epigraph from Rimbaud:
"Je suis in piston, rien de plus"; he then continues,
It's Sunday, the twenty-somethingth of October,
and I'm in exile and I'm writing a book. That's
all there is to do in exile. Ideals, love, the
spiritual world don't inspire me, either as reali
ties or possibilities. The only way to stay alive
at all is to write your daily biography, telling it
all as it comes, (p. 7)
It is, then, an intense turning-in on oneself which offers
the sole means of self-perpetuation. On a more highly
individualized scale, here is once again the initial sur
realist endeavor, which tries to find the real self, along
with its capacities and potentials, beneath the crust of
its civilised facade. But perhaps most important is the
fact that this intense turning-inward occurs because of the
context, the "sterile country" of Celtic literature, which
provides no viable outlets— only self-destruction or
madness:
49
Yes, we're in exile. I don't mean just from
our countries. That's nothing. I mean from the
very idea of country, nation, the very idea of
@od, the very idea of ourselves. Our minds have
exploded. They're wide open. ... We're beside
everything, including ourselves. No scale of being
for us* No definition. We're just sheer openness.
The only image familiar to us is— Hiroshima. That's
our faith, philosophy, art and morality.
We're in exile. At the edge of the world. Cp. 8)
There's no aim or end to our lives, just as
there's no aim or end to our writings, because
we're submerged by a gigantic finality. Beside it,
every aim is laughable. That's why we tend to the
grotesque, the fantastic, the crazy gesture. (p. 10)
There is a hopeless absurdity, a lack of cohesion
everywhere; even in the images which kindle the imagina
tion, one is only brutally brought back again to absurdity:
Streets of Paris, old bones with no marrow. Odd
scenes and events can arrest your attention for a
moment: the negress with the crimson nails; the
drunk woman with the Chinese skirt and the violin;
the baby buying a lottery ticket. But that doesn't
get you out of the prison. These scenes and events
don't mean anything. They're all autonomous, (p. I1 *)
The logic of normal life is absurd. The poet finds his
values defining themselves more clearly as whatever values
are opposite those surrounding him:
To be informed means to be deformed. To be in
the swim is the same as to be up with the Joneses:
a pastime for the hyper-adapted .... No more
hospitals, just a little health; no more culture,
just a little pure matter. And as for writing,
literature, it means nothing at all if it doesn't
taka a step out into reality (which is damned cold
at the present moment}. There are all kinds of
ways of staying inside. The idea is to get outside—
taking your body along with you. (p. 10)
Reality, then, that "real life," Is elsewhere. And so
White refuses to become a part of civilisation, adding,
50
"In this refusal (the negation of a negation) is my begin
ning.” (p. 10) We next have indications presented as to
the means of deliverance implied within this commencement—
the sea, the earth-matter, the immediate sense percep
tions :
The cakes are dead, the clothes are dead, the flowers
are dead, the meat is dead, but there's still a
vestige of life and freedom about the herring, (p. 13)
What I want is the marrow, the matter. The rela
tionships will take care of themselves, (p. 1U)
A man has to find a root, or accept a convention.
I'm trying to find a root. (p. 10)
Yet, as a part of the grotesque world, he must learn
to live with its madness, and, to do so, become a little
mad, a little grotesque himself (cf. , "I am a gargoyle on
the walls of time,” p. 12), even creating out of this mad
ness his own, more meaningful expression; the process is
the surrealist one of the d€r£alisation of the exterior
environment:
All through the years the snow has been falling
greenly, and I sit at my fire of ice roasting straw
berries, telling stories to the Babylonian who lives
in the Brussels sprout. Myself, (p. 12)
From this point on he may go anywhere--no one can tell
and no one can help. In the closing paragraphs of the
article we see that he has indeed whirled out of the realm
of the ordinary, and into the chaos of the extraordinary,
the surreal, in an all-or-nothing quest to penetrate the
51
area where "real” life is, to find a true, demonic liberty.
Faced with the prospect of total madness in a sterile
world, his first impulse is toward movement; as he races
along the shore, along the "edge of the world,” we see that
he has realized what his future course must be: to tread
the tightrope equilibrium between two realities— the
physical and the metaphysical, or symbolically, as it
appears here, the earth and the sea. The explosion of the
individual who has "lost everything," which is the starting
point of the following quotation, indicates, as in Celtic
poetry of this type, the total dissolution of the "private"
self, and the diffusion of its essence into the millions of
elements which make up the fecund universe, in order to
re-absorb someday, perhaps, those elements into another,
purified, wholeness:
I had lost everything. To recover at least
myself, I had to stand on the silver backbone of a
hare in the middle of the sea and try to grasp the
piece of matchstick. Suddenly I was free. On the
pier, I told the girl sitting behind the desk piled
up with books she should quit, there was freedom
enough for everybody. She didn't believe me.
Walking along the shore, I heard young boys discuss
ing me, saying I could have won the race easily if
I hadn't broken my ankle. I was warmed to them,
but I no longer cared a damn about the race. I
walked along the shore: waves, seaweed, and sand.
I come to Danny's house, and I go in. We talk of
hrotherhood. I stay the night. In the morning,
Danny is dead. There is a crowd of people round
the house. I show a chart, written in Scots, but
one part was written in german by my grandfather
when he was in Poland.
I continue walking along the shore, (p. 15)
52
The appearance in print of "At the Edge of the World"
provided the occasion for a letter from Andjr£ Breton to
White on January 10, 1965, in which Breton writes:
Jeudi soir attabl€ comme de coutume avec les amis
au fond de ce caf£ des Hailes 1 l'enseigne de "la
Promenade de ydnus," j'ayais, la reyue en main,
longuement insist^ sur le haut accent de nouvaut£
qui me frappait dans cet "A-la lisldre“9u monde."
C u n p u b lis h e d l e t t e r ; my own
u n d e r lin in g s )
This gesture on Breton's part was his recognition of the
affinity which connected the two of them. In the same
letter Breton invites White to collaborate with him on a
future publication of the review La Breche, Action surreal-
Nietzsche believed in the value of isolation, Thoreau
in that of simplification. Letters from Gourgounel takes
as its point of departure these two motifs. Having bought
and reconstructed an old farmhouse in the Ardeche valley in
southern France in 1963, which he named "Gourgounel" to
mean "gurgling" source, White sequestered himself there in
a concentrated effort to renew his contacts with the earth
and with himself. Given the nature of our modern world,
such an action must appear anachronistic; but White was
TS— .
White himself writes of this is an autobiographical
essay of 1968: "I was later to become acquainted with
Andre Breton, who liked my writings . . . and who did me
the honor of calling me his friend." (unpublished easay,
p. * ♦ ) The text White contributed to La Brfeche in 1965 was
entitled "Tea thousand Yellow Buds."
53
listening for the rhythms of the earth-chant, whereas most
of the rest of the world heard only military music or a
political soft-shoe. The days of political activity for
White were not far away (Way of 1968), but for the present
he was, as someone once said, "marching to a distant
drummer." To do this required audacity, wilfullness and
perserverance, all of which he has (along with, when pushed
far enough, a grizzly humour). Letters from Gourgounel is
both entertaining (with hundreds of anecdotes, observations
gathered by White as he buzzes like a super-animated gadfly
through the Ard&che community) and stark (when expressing
the quest which is his central mission--the quest for a
unity with the earth). In the chapter "A Branch of Plums,"
White sees the plum branch as both symbol and goal of this
quest:
It is all the world I want, but I want it centred .
... I want to bring the whole world into my
self, and into more than my self— that plum branch
there. I want to be able to look at one thing,
and feel its multiple radiations, be aware of the
innumerable references which surround it, and yet
still see it in its oneness. I want the one and
the many to be no longer separate. I do not want
my self to be separate in the world. I want it
to strike outwards from its centre, the centre
it feels and knows; I want it to feel all its
connections, yet still be itself; be manifoldly
aware and yet not lose itself in that awareness,
able to concentrate it. It was to obtain this
faculty of concentration that I ce^me to gourgounel.
Not to retire from the world. Cpp. 87-88)39
Cf. Breton's "point of the mind" discussed in the
Second Manifesto; yet White, at this point, is even more
deeply immersed in Eastern thought than Breton had been.
5*+
This quest for a unitive experience of the world is
the bond between White and Breton, and their mutual tie
with Celtic mythology. Their methods are of course differ-
ent, but then so are the conditions which shaped them.
White expresses his desire in this way:
The desire of a whole world, the nostalgia of
unity and unitive experience, can only appear as
mad and aberrant in a civilisation which, while
it satisfies many desires (most of which it has
previously fabricated), leaves unsatisfied the one
fundamental need, of which the poets, above all,
are conscious.
It is the expression of this need that runs
like a white thread through modern poetry, like
a faster, more urgent current in the general
turgid or trivial mass of literature.41
And again, in "Letter to an Old Calligrapher" (1968), he
writes,
With a play on words (poetry is also that), and with
the knowledge that "whiteness" is the synthesis of
all colours, I tend, for the moment, to call this
"complete realisation of myself"— "whiteness,"
and to translate moments of unity by terms indica
tive of whiteness; as I call my world "the white
world."
(unpublished essay, p.l)
Letters from Gourgounel opens with a purpose and closes
with a promise, in the guise of a revelation; the quest has
penetrated the frontiers of the other-world, the earth-
__ -
White, for example, at this point firmly refuses to
"occultize" his quest or his message. Also, he rejects
Muse poetry (which Breton embraces ardently, as it were) on
ontological grounds.
^Kenneth White, "Into the White World," Raster
(Spring, 1972), p. 4.
55
mother's world, and the poet holds the chalice to his lips:
I lay there . . . naked in the sunny shadow of
the trees, with the earth strongly, intensely per
fumed all around me. I knew I had reached the
depth of living I had so lQng been lQoking for*
Yet it was not completely mine, it hhd not yet
absorbed me, for with that realization went, almost
simultaneously, the fear that I would lose it, that
I would not always be able to reach it and live
there, in ease and confidence. It seemed to me
for an awful moment like something I would always
have to strive for and would always lose. Any
kind of settlement seemed impossible. There was
nothing to hold this presence. Everything built
by man, of stone or thought, seemed vowed to des
truction and if not to destruction, to debasement
and falseness. The pure water was there, inter
mittently, but our pitchers were rotten. So the
parable came to me.
And it was then I thought of poetry, and the
idea of poetry flooded into my mind like pure water
itself. (pp. mO-141)
"The poem is a sign, not only an object," White writes
in "Le monde blanc" (En toute candeur, p. 63), and as a
sign indicates the way to something beyond itself. Beyond
the poem lies the myth. "There is a burning need of an
intellectual culture, centred around some unifying myth,"
writes White in "Into the White World." (p. 3) "To pro
pose a myth," he continues,
. . . which is a complex of images with an idea of
life both personal and social, is to invite, first
and foremost, the development of the human mind as
a whole and the development of a life, personal and
social, corresponding to it. It is to reawaken the
sense of a fully and harmoniously deyeloped humanity,
(p. 3)
This is what White attempts to do in the third section
of The Cold Wind of Dawn. The terrain is that of the cold
and sterile on the one hand and the white unknown on the
56
other: both areas of Naked Ground. Poetry is the sign
that brings the two worlds together; one example of this
in the poem "Fishing Off Jura," in which the other-world
contains the sustenance for this one:
White moon in your light
the sea is the ghost of the land
an unholy ghost
and full of red rish of poetry
the deep-down poetry I trade my life for
and I feel it as I feel my blood
(p. 55)
Another example is in "Solstice," the final poem of the
book, where the poet again affirms the liberating power
of poetry:
for long the world was an inn
an ale-house back of heaven
where all were benighted and lost
but I say the world is a range of possibles
and the flight of wild poems
(p. 58)
The entry into the White World indeed is no longer
simply a desire but an unfolding reality into which the
poet now penetrates:
now in grey grandeur and glory severe
words I strike
from the raging roaring air
and cup
in my hollow tongue
the brine
of the brimming fields
and ascend the high hills of praise
the sun in my hand
("Aurora," p. ^8)
And again:
here at the rising of the sun
the white sea-organ thundering
on the Christmas shore
crossing the holly and ivy wood
and t'je rippled stream running
through the crimson thorn
I have come again into my own
("Primrose Hill," p. 50)
And again:
This holy-of-holy rock
this barnacle-crowned
and wrack-encumbered
ridged and rifted, worn
and weathered stone
is the altar whereon I
man and poet
make abrupt communion
with the virgin world
("Ars Poetica," p. 53)
And yet again:
Beside the evangel sea
I strike my path
along the ascetic shore
where the seamews cry
and the sun
has his hand on my shoulder
and beyond the isles of the sea
at the Great Gate
where the ocean begins
and my life ends
I see a lighted place
with a single tree
and it’s there I lay me down
the gulls crying over me
("Pilgrim," p. 54)
The initial quest, then, has been undertaken and
achieved. But there remain many more ahead, and each into
uncharted territories. After the initial quest. White
seems to moye toward other quests, which inyolye greater
and greater abstract reality, and where "whiteness," for
example, is no longer symbolic of something else, but
becomes a reality in its own right. Never a Muse poet, and
58
by choice, White goes directly to the ontological feminine
source within the. earth, and there absorbs its mysteries,
42
not trying to analyze them. At moments of conjuncture,
after patient waiting, the coming and going between worlds,
the give and take between masculine and feminine elements,
occurs spontaneously, as an almost gnostic experience, in
an atmosphere of breathless discovery, as in this world of
i i O
Magog, the Earth-Mother, in "The Blue Doors of January":
Wood-silence, mud fertility, gloriousness.
Great rounded boulders. Rich water-sound of life
flowing deep in the silence; and grotesque, sap-
filled roots heaving up out of the pungent earth.
Waternity. Red--it is red. The river alone in
its madness, (p. 67)
In such moments of communion, physical and metaphysical
elements interpermeate, and the union is one of essences,
of pure being:
The sea bares her thighs
mud weed and crab-humps
blue-lipped molluscs
and the redness of the sun
("Blue Doors," p. 70)
It is no wonder that the initial White World is cold
and wintry, for it is the desolated domain of the raging
"... there is something beyond muse poetry,
white-goddess poetry, something without which muse-poetry
itself degenerates, and which is white-world poetry.
Beyond the goddess, there is the world . . . ." (."Into the
White World," p. 6)
4 3
Kenneth White, "Les portes bleues de janvier "
("TheBLue Doors of January"), Les Lettres Nouyelles (Mai-
juin, 1970), pp. 57-70.
59
Earth-Mother, long sequestered in her frigidity. In the
course of White's poetry a slow transformation of this
frozen element takes place, and that change in function of
the mutual exchanges between subject and object, between
the poet and his world. Both are modified, both are
enriched; they are, after all, intended to complement one
another. After the penetration through to the utmost
depths of this foreign world, the phenomenon of reversibi-
lite operates once more, as it has with Celtic and Surreal
ist literature of this type; the signs change: after
accepting and living long within this glacial element, the
poet perceives that it has, with infinite languor, de
solidified, and is melting. It is then that the two inter
penetrate, unite, and slowly re-concentrate into one
incandescent centre comparable in intensity only to the
sun itself. This is the "White World" of White's more
recent poetry:
Many images blur the mind
the highest poetry
is stricken
with poverty of image
when the white light
is at its blindingest
all objects disappear
the skull like a sun
im----------
Kenneth White, "Cape Breton Elegy," Raster (Summer,
1970).
60
II. THE TRANSCENDENTAL SCOT
Here at last is something
in the doings of man that
corresponds with the broad
cast doings of the day and
night. 1
-Whitman
i.
In the first chapter we discussed one dualistic
conception of the world as interpreted through Celtic
mythology, which was, as we saw, divided into male and
female counterparts, much like the Taoist principles of
yin and yang— principles which perpetually interact and
seek each other out. Yet the Celtic view of complementary
dualities has never been widely accepted in Western
culture, which has traditionally chosen, from Plato on, to
interpret duality as a kind of war between two worlds,
physical and spiritual, with the physical one usually
coming in a very sorry second.
The American Transcendentalists, however, those
pioneers in the "virgin territory" first explored by Kant,
Schelling and others, came up with a new angle of vision
which, at its best, was able to unite into a harmonious
------r----------------
Walt Whitman, 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, ed. by
Emory Holloway (New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1855,
1926), p. 489.
61
whole the warring worlds of spirit and matter— that bSte
noire of Western culture. It was natural that Kenneth
White, believing strongly in the basically Eastern con
ception of complementary dualities with which Celtic
mythology had provided him, should next address himself to
the problem of dualities as it was posed to more funda
mentally Western cultures, and should then seek a resolution
to that problem in his poetry. He did so by using the
methods suggested by those eastward-moving Western spirits,
the Transcendentalists. He had turned to them fairly early
in his life, it seems, judging from what he writes in a
letter of October of 1973--as early as the age of fourteen
or fifteen. One volume of Emerson’s works, he writes, had
been
. . . in my parents’ house as far back as I can
remember. ... My father bought it off a book-
barrow in Glasgow secondhand .... All my
essays at secondary school came out of this--
just as, at university, they were full of
Nietzsche.^
The American Transcendentalists, like their German
counterparts, embraced a conception of knowledge which
allowed for vast realms of experience beyond man's conscious
awareness or control. The unknowable universe was for them
a part of the divine world, to which man, with so much
divinity in him, had access (here they go beyond the
^Unpublished letter; in the same letter White adds
that the essays "The American Scholar,” ’ ’ Poetry and Imagi
nation,” and ”The Method of Nature” are heavily underscored
from repeated readings.
62
boundaries of Kantian theory) through the medium of his
intuitions and supra-rational perceptions. When at his
peak, man's vision could coalesce with the divine (which
was manifested through Nature), and he could then penetrate
"through to the white," or, in the image Emerson used,
become a "transparent eyeball." Although Kenneth White
does not share with Emerson a belief in an ultimately
religious divinity (resembling Whitman and Thoreau rather
than Emerson here), or in the basically moral and progress
ive order of the universe, he has nevertheless adopted the
American Transcendentalists' spiritual thrust, which goes
from a physical-spiritual matrix through to the absolute
(an absolute which became, in Emerson's case, an inward
quest rather than an outward-moving thrust). Their mutual
goals, despite the span in time and the span between
continents, and despite the varying images through which
they spoke, are basically the same--to see man restored to
his fullest physical and spiritual splendor.
We shall now explore some of the beliefs and methods
of the American Transcendentalists, particularly Emerson,
in order then to see how White both incorporates and modi
fies those methods and beliefs in his own poetic practice.
63
Man is not order of nature, .
. . belly and members, link in
a chain, nor any ignominious
baggage, but a stupendous
antagonism, a dragging together
of the poles of the Universe.
-Emerson3
ii.
'•Recognize the inextinguishable dualism," Emerson had
written in his journal in 1838, followed by, "But also show
U
that to seek Unity is a necessity of the mind." The two
phrases, incongruously juxtaposed as they are, formed the
thesis and antithesis of Emerson's dialectic. It is this
tenuous equipoise of unity achieved by "dragging together"
dualities (meaning a kind of "naturalism" yoked to "ideal
ism") which forms the basis for their poetic credo and
which is our central concern with the Transcendentalist
movement.
The basic premise of Transcendentalist thinking, which
also ties it to the work of Kenneth White— specifically the
thought of Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau— is an exploration
------g----------------
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
1820-1872 , e d . by E dw ard W aldo Em erson (Hew Y o rk ! H o u g h to n
Mifflin Co., 1910), 4 (1936-1938), 435-436.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works, ed. by
Edward Waldo Emerson (New York! William H. Wise and Co.,
1923), 6:153.
64
of the underlying relationship of man to nature.^ Thoreau's
Walden (1854), for example (from which White's Letters from
Gourgounel seems to be partially derived), and his earlier
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), are both
explorations of this type, with man (far more than in the
works of Emerson and Whitman) thoroughly submerged within
the natural element, as if attempting to match pulses with
nature. "I do not value any view of the universe," Thoreau
asserted in his journal in 1852, "into which man and the
institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of
the attention. Man is but the place where I stand." A
"sauvage" like Kenneth White, who is perhaps guilty of
"dropping society clean out of his theories," as Bronson
Alcott suggested, Thoreau gave himself over to the natural
rather than the social order. He once wrote in his
journal (in reference to a specific night of August 12,
1851, although the phrase might stand as his personal
manifesto as well):
----------------
Robert E. Spiller, "Literary Fulfillment," Literary
History of the United States, ed. by Robert E. Spiller
et. al. (Flew Vork: The MacMillan Company, 1953, rev.
1960), p. 351.
0
The American Transcendentalists: Their Prose and
Poetry, ed. by Perry Hiller (New 'fork: Doubleday and
Co., Inc., 1957), p. 79.
65
There are but ut three, the moon, the earth which
wears this jewel (the moon's reflection) in her
crown, and myself.7
Whitman, whose "Song of Myself" (18 55) together with
his general emphasis on his own body and person might seem
to place him at the other end of the Transcendentalist
spectrum from Thoreau, minimized neither his physicality
nor his ego; we will later see (in chapter three) how
Kenneth White also stresses the value of the human ego
which Whitman knew was a potent creative force:
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking
and breeding,
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy g
whatever I touch or am touch'd from ....
Even the prudish Thoreau, however, confessed after meeting
Whitman that "He may turn out the least of a braggart of
all, having a better right to be confident.” (Transcenden
talists, p. 370) Although their starting points were
vastly different, Whitman and Thoreau in fact shared a
common philosophical base, in that man's relation to nature
was their primary concern. Whitman's "self" (a particu
larly lusty self in the earlier poems), was undeniably his
■"7
Transcendentalists, p. 72. Alcott, again showing his
characteristic insight into his friend's personality, wrote
of Thoreau: "He seemed one with things, of Nature's
essence and core." (p. 93)
O
Whitman, "Song of Myself," Leaves of Grass, pp. 44-
45.
66
point of reference, but the goal lay far beyond what is
commonly understood by the term ("I . . . am not contain'd
between my hat and boots,” Whitman wrote in "Song of
Myself"); the self, like grass, implied not the private and
exclusive, but the common, universal principle of life in
which all people share:
These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages
and lands, they are not original with me, . . .
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the
riddle they are nothing
("Song of Myself," p. 39)
because, as he continues, "In all people I see myself."
(p. *+1) He differs from other people only in that it is
his goal and purpose as poet to be able to express to other
people that common principle:
To me the converging objects of the universe
perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the
writing means
("Song of Myself," p. •+!)
The self, then, was for Whitman the key to the universe,
able to unlock its secrets; it acted as a symbol for him,
much as the creations of nature were symbols for Thoreau.
Why the emphasis on nature? The question goes to the
heart of Transcendentalist philosophy, and is our central
concern in relationship to White. The basic premises of
Transcendental philosophy were (1) that there exists an
underlying unity of structure to the universe, which we
cannot perhaps perceive rationally, but which makes itself
67
felt in nature through a multitude of "faint clews and
indirections," to use Whitman's phrase; (2) that the
sympathetic and intuitive perceptions of the individual
are necessary for perceiving these "clews" and relating
them to the whole of life; and (3) that there exists a
direct correspondence, or, as Emerson said, a "perfect
parallelism between the laws of Nature and the laws of
thought," which makes perceptual faculties the necessary
connecting arc to complete the sphere of man and nature
10
into wholeness. (Works, 8:8) This is, in outline, the
Transcendentalist credo, which, as we will see, Kenneth
White adopts as his own poetic credo. These premises also
touch upon many of the more well-known aspects of the
Transcendentalist movement, notably, the individual as the
spiritual center of the universe (which he must be in order
to act as its interpreter), the intuitive and imaginative
faculties as primary (making knowledge— in a gnostic sense—
of the whole possible, and calling into play the individu
al's emotional capacities). Since "things admit of being
used as symbols, because nature is a symbol, in the whole,
and in every part," a linear or purely analytic logic would
q----------------
"When I Read the Book," p. 7. Emerson's own phrase
was: "Everything in the universe goes by indirections.
There are no straight lines." (Works, 7:181)
^It is no coincidence that Emerson's preferred symbol
was the circle, and that his favorite metaphor for describ
ing the workings of the mind was the growth of a tree.
68
not achieve the necessary "warmth” (Emerson's word) to
penetrate surface phenomena, or else, in a desire to form
systems intelligible to it, would impose a static equival
ency to the natural flux. (Emerson, Works, 3:13) "Nature
always wears the colors of the spirit," Emerson furthermore
wrote, implying that more than the analytic mind was needed
11
to see into its workings. (Works, 1:11)
If the individual (or poet, as prototypical indivi
dual) becomes interpreter of the natural world, which is
itself a living symbol of the divine, Emerson believed his
function inevitably assumes moral overtones; "nature is a
fable whose moral blazes through it," Emerson states,
(Works, 8:223) and the poet's job is, as Whitman says, to
"get what the writing means." He must perceive, unify and
reflect to others his vision, in hopes that it may help
them to do the same, becoming, in short, a kind of secular
savior of the race. As Whitman so aptly summed it up in
Democratic Vistas: "The priest departs, the divine liter
atus comes."
The foundation making possible Emerson's belief in an
ultimately unified world, Sherman Paul postulates in
---------------
In his typically prickly way, Thoreau said the same
thing: "I witness a beauty in the form or coloring of the
clouds which addresses itself to my imagination, for which
you account scientifically to my understanding, but do not
so account to my imagination. It is what it suggests and
is the symbol of that I care for, and if, by any trick of
science, you rob it of its symbolicalness, you do me no
service and explain nothing." (Transcendentalists, pp. 74-
75)
69
Emerson’s Angle of Vision, lies in the theory of an almost
mystic correspondence between the laws of the spiritual and
12
natural worlds. This correspondence, being essentially
supra-rational, could only be realized by what Emerson
called ”lyrical glances.” Paul writes of Emerson:
For him correspondence covered all the ways by which
man came into relation with the world outside him
self, transformed the world into himself, and
expressed the insight of the experience in words
and character.*3
Emerson’s procedure, then, like White’s, was to transfer
the dualism of spirit and matter into the human mind for
resolution; he then tried to glean from other, more syste
matic thinkers, like Kant, Schelling and Coleridge, some
philosophical base ex post facto for validating the role of
perception, for restoring an intuitive, imaginative faculty
to reason, and for corroborating the theory of a universal
14
law. Perception (in the sense Schelling had affirmed that
that perception is knowing) bridged the gap between inner
— 19
And it remains Emerson who is the philosophical
father of the movement, who attempted to resolve contra
dictions on an abstract level, as well as a physical one.
Whitman's legendary statement made to his friend Trowbridge
in 1854 testifies to his own debt to Emerson: ”1 was
simmering, simmering, and Emerson brought me to a boil.”
13
Sherman Paul, Emerson's Angle of Vision: Man and
Nature in American Experience (Cambridge: Harvard Univer
sity Press, 1§52), p. 4.
14
Vision, p. 29. White goes to other thinkers for
confirmation of his insights also, including Breton,
Nietzsche, Meister Eckhart, and various Eastern thinkers,
like Chuang-tzu.
70
and outer worlds, subject and object, and fused the two.
In what can only seem paradoxical or tautological to the
purely rational mind, Emerson’s theory would have it that
if one believed in the ultimate unity of the universe, one
had the natural "warmth” to project that belief into his
perceptions, and thereby to kindle and fuse the disparate
elements of matter and spirit into a unified whole; this
intuition of wholeness, therefore, was the sine qua non of
the entire endeavor.
Perception of the type we are discussing, or a kind of
intuition of wholeness, Emerson called ’ ’ inspiration”; for
him, it was also the necessary starting point for poetry.
Inspiration was not possible, however, until the moment
when inner principles coincided with outer, when the indi
vidual , working within his personal laws, locked into
harmony with the laws of nature, and vision penetrated
’ ’ through to the white”:
Inspiration was achieved by getting into position,
and in that moment when the poles of the eye coin
cided with the axis of the world, the spiritual
circuit was completed.
CVision, p. 70)
At such moments, Emerson maintained, one could perceive the
perfect sphere, the wholeness of being. If vision remained
opaque, the fault was not with nature, but with the per-
ceiver, the eye of the individual, which had not succeeded
in attuning itself to nature. If vision did penetrate, the
71
effect was one of what White calls "whiteness,” and Emerson
describes as total transparency:
I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see
all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part or particle of G o d .15
(Works, 1:10)
Merely to be aware of unity, however, was not enough;
once the unity was made in the mind, it must, according to
Emerson's belief in moral responsibility, be transmitted to
others, and this process was bound up for Emerson in a
theory of language (whereas, for White, there is no moral
responsibility as such; there is rather a spontaneous desire
to convey insights to others through poetry). It becomes
the perceiver and poet's duty, as Emerson saw it, to
achieve a kind of interwoven double vision by relating
these two worlds in terms of each other, and, thereby, in
the imagination, uniting them— even if only in brief, fitful
flashes of inspiration. Since nature continually changes
and metamorphoses its symbols, the poet, too, must capture
this suggestion of transition in his own symbols by con
stantly recasting his poems in newer, fresher images, which
"must be as new as foam and as old as the rock" (Emerson,
Works, 8:^0), whereas the everyday language we speak remains
TC'
Since so much of Emerson's methodology was based on
vision, it is not surprising that his recurring images are
those of the eye, or sight. In fact, a caricaturist of
Emerson's time, Christopher Cranch, depicted Emerson as
merely a huge eyeball mounted on two spindly legs. (from a
sketch in Paul's Angle of Vision, Introduction)
72
with us as our "fossil poetry." (3:22) To capture the flux
both of nature and his own spirit, the poet must think by
analogy, the only means of relating the dualities in terms
of each other, making analogy the vehicle capable of
holding the two worlds poised and balanced for a moment
together. This, Emerson felt, was what man's spirit and
nature were calling for him to do, and was the goal of
poetry: to give us flashes of a unified and pulsating
cosmos.
With Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, as well as with
White, there is also a further thrust beyond that of a
revitalized theory of art, since the highest manifestation
for them of this "gai science," as Emerson called it, was
not found in books or art, but in the character and life
of the individual. This seems a natural outgrowth of the
emphasis given to Man Acting, as the necessary complement
to Man Thinking (to use Emerson's phrase from "The American
Scholar") ; for him, thought needs action and leads to
action, which arrives finally at immanence. It is a sig
nificant fact for our purposes of understanding their
poetic credo that these three Transcendentalists, like
Kenneth White, all tended to become the incarnations of
their beliefs. Once they had succeeded in "taking a central
position in the universe and living in its forms," as
Emerson put it (Works, 8:^2), their utterances were only an
additional step in that journey toward the "most life,"
73
where Thoreau was neaded; the real "transcendence"--and the
ultimate meaning of the word for them--consisted not just
in a theory of cognition, or in setting up poetry as its
own absolute, but in gaining a unified physical and spirit
ual life, set into movement by the poetic sparks of inspir
ation. For, in the end, as Whitman put it in reference to
the creative spirit, "The song is to the singer, and comes
back most to him." ("A Song of the Rolling Earth," p. 188)
and why do I squander my life-time painting
because when I am painting
I know myself in the midst
of something living
-Kenneth White
iii.
The fact that the Transcendentalists we have studied
gave such importance both to the physical world and to the
unified embodiment of their ideas, which sometimes led them
from the intellectualism of words to the unutterability of
immanence, seems highly significant for this study in light
of the discussion in Erich Heller's essay, "The Artist's
T5-------------
Kenneth White, A Walk Along the Shore (a collection
of numbered poems as yet unpublished in its entirety,
portions of which have appeared in the periodicals Raster
and Akros).
7i+
Journey into the Interior.” In this essay (subtitled ”A
Hegelian Prophecy and Its Fulfillment”), Heller credits
Hegel with being
. . . the first systematically to diagnose the
Romantic malady of his age as a severance 01 mind
from world, soul from circumstance, human inward
ness from external condition.17
The great Classical age, Heller continues in his paraphrase
of Hegel, epitomizes the sole moment in the history of
Western culture when the Spirit or Idea (Geist) came
fleetingly to rest in the objects of the physical world, in
a sort of "ideal naturalism." (Interior, pp. 108-112,
passim) It being the nature of the Spirit, however, to
disencumber itself of all physical restraints, the union
was destined to end; (p. 115) Romantic art remains as a
type of post artem, in which Spirit seeks to couch itself
deep within its own medium, in the "pure inwardness of
human subjectivity." (p. 113)
It is this total subjectivity, or inwardness, Heller
convincingly argues (if, in fact, we need to be convinced),
which is the general drift of modern art, at least when it
is not manifesting itself as non-art or wasteland:
The Romantic world has resounded ever since with
the sounds of the inward soul, sounds which, by
passing the domain of things, have found their
musical order in pure principles of the mind ....
— ------------------------------------
Erich Heller, The Artsit's Journey Into the Interior
(New York: Random House, 1959, 1965), p. 103. The book's
title is taken from the title of the main essay within it.
75
And the scene of Romantic art has been set ever since
for the play with abstractions from the solid world,
with signs signifying nothing unless it be for the
mind's eye alone, and with disembodied forms and
patterns, and with words, words, words, unsullied
by the common touch of reality; and it has swarmed
with spirits alienated from the world and with worlds
alienated from the spirit; and it has shown process
ions of authors vainly in search of their "real”
person; of land surveyors without land to survey;
of strangers, strangers, strangers; . . .
(Interior, pp. 129-130)
The artist, disembodied within this spiritual welter,
becomes as a consequence "ever freer and more and more
'creative'"; Heller continues:
He found himself loose, and often at a loss, among
the seemingly infinite potentialities of his choice.
Anything, ... be it madonna or courtesan, saint
or pagan, beast or thing, invited his fair attention,
turning him into the Don Juan of the creative spirit.
(Interior, pp. 134-135)
It remained for Rilke, Heller postulates, to carry the
Hegelian prophecy of absolute inwardness to its conclusion,
which, in Rilke's Duino Elegies, means to allow Spirit to
flee the body totally, and, also, to provide for the body
(or physical world) once it has been deserted; as Rilke
expresses it in his ninth elegy:
Erde, ist es nicht dies, was du willst: unsichtbar
in uns erstehn? --1st es dein Traum nicht,
einmal unsichtbar zu sein? --Erde! unsichtbar!
Was, wenn Verwandlung nicht, ist dein drSngender
Auftrag?
(quoted by Heller, Interior,
p. 150)
Thus, Heller concludes, Rilke has portrayed the "dispropor
tion between the inner life and the external world . . . ."
(p. 15 3) As fulfillment of the Hegelian prophecy, it was
76
Rilke's calling to transform into his "infinite inwardness"
the physical things of the earth— but not by any process
merely of dissolving their heaviness then spiritualizing
them. The process in which Rilke was involved was a "cata
clysmic event" parallel with the resurrection in religious
thought, in which
. . . the perishable bread, remaining bread, is
invisibly transubstantiated, and the perished
body, restored to its bodiliness, is invisibly
resurrected.
(Interior, p. 170)
A similar transubstantiation of the natural universe
seems at first glance to be the mission of Kenneth White
as well, who writes in Letters from Gourgounel with humor
and pathos of a huge and grotesque mushroom discovered in
the woods near his mountain home:
At the moment I am sitting writing at this table,
with the great mushroom in my left hand like a torch,
trying to give it some eternity .... All my
writing comes from such wonders, and is the attempt
to re-figure them in another element. To trans-
cendentalize them. No phrase is grotesque enough
to express what I try to do. . . . I have never
cared much about gods, their life and death; and
with regard to the death of myself and those like
me, my attitude is stoic. But that the wonders of
the earth should pass without my attempting to
sing their glory, that for me would be abandon
and miserable solitude.^-®
At the conclusion of the chapter in question (entitled "The
Surrealist Mushroom"), the ultimate goal appears manifest:
4 0
Kenneth White, Letters from Sourgounel (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1966), pp. 78-7§.
77
About twenty yards up from the house, among the
whins, there is a big wooden cross on a pedestal,
set there by some former owner, perhaps the faith-
healer. I shall bury the mushroom up there.
It shall become for us a sign and a symbol.
The resurrection and the life.
(Gourgounei, p. 80)
Is this, we might ask, the same "invisible resurrection"
of the physical world Rilke writes of in his ninth elegy?
There seems to be in Kenneth White’s writing a basic
ally different strain underlying this superficial similar
ity to Rilke’s mission, upon which the preceding quote is
only superimposed— a strain more akin to that sounded by
Emerson in his conviction of the wholeness of life, of an
as yet intact correspondence possible between man and
nature, Emerson's "other me," than to Rilke's wistful
19
lament of alienation. The deep conviction of the Trans-
cendentalists, and of Kenneth White, is that nature does
intrinsically contain the spiritual "clew" (or "clou-," as
White uses the term) we seek to make life whole, and will
actively disclose it to the seeker in harmony or corres
pondence with nature. Wholeness, as the following fragment
would seem to indicate, is indeed possible, and is in some
way inextricable from nature:
When all co-ordinates
when the scattered elements gather
---- rg------------
This is not to overlook that Rilke participates in
a similar search for harmony and, by spiritualizing the
physical world, also achieves wholeness; the difference
lies in Rilke's emphasis on the role of man as poetic
creator of a spirit not intrinsic in nature.
78
and the cool light blazes in the skull
and the body knows its harmony 2o
I tell you the psyche is a white-winged bird
Or, as conveyed by White elsewhere, when harmony is not
achieved, the flaw lies, as Emerson also believed, in our
own "opaqueness," our inability to articulate and clarify,
rather than in the harmonious totality of nature; at such
moments, White says, we are like the confused and alienated
participant in Baudelaire's "Correspondences”:
I have come in under the trees
making love to them with my inarticulate hands
("Valley of Birches," The
Bird Path, eleventh poem)
It is possible that the Transcendentalists do not
represent a nostalgia for ancient Greece, but a whole new
development in a different vein, a movement not toward the
Grecian "idealized naturalism," but toward a "realized
naturalism," in all its fresh particularity of difference,
in which spirit is not idealized beyond the natural body,
but remains an intrinsic part of it. It is in this same
context that I situate the work of Kenneth White. His goal
is no longer like that of Rilke— to spiritualize nature—
but instead, to naturalize spirit, to return to man his
physical nature, and to real-ize the spiritual welter
surrounding us, all the while maintaining the spirit intact.
What is "Metaphysical?" White asks in the poem "Region of
----------------
Kenneth White, "The Psyche as a Laughing Gull,"
The Bird Path, The Decal Review (Autumn, 1971), tenth
poem.
79
Identitythen answers in the same poem:
--the physical absolute
the opaque burned out 21
the heaviness dissolved
No longer is the goal Rilke's "spiritual absolute," but,
like Emerson's "transparent eyeball," it becomes a "physi
cal absolute" which combines biological processes with the
highest reaches of the intellect, as the following poem
illustrates:
the poem being
what happens when
a welter of substantial
feelings and facts
have passed through the thalamus
the belly of the brain
and ascended
without short-circuiting
right up into the cortical region
from where
abstracted
they return again
22
worded on the tongue
This is not primitive poetry, but poetry based on an emi
nently modern theme, perhaps even too modern to be
— 21
from The Bird Path; this poem also appeared in Raster
(Summer, 1970).
^Kenneth White, "XLVII," A Walk Along the Shore. In
all deference to traditional typographical presentation of
poetry, I am deliberately altering the format with these
poems in accordance with their appearance in manuscript
form; the space between the lines acts as one of their most
crucial poetic elements. Poem number XLVII appeared in
Raster (Winter, 1972-73).
80
recognized as such. That his poetry does not yearn, as
Rilke's does, for a "spiritual absolute" known only to the
angels, White makes clear in this poem, which follows in
the manuscript collection immediately after White's trans
lation of a portion of Rilke's ninth Duino Elegie:
let us speak no more of angels
but of the Great Skua
skimming down
the east coast of Skotland
with stercorant gab
in a windy and white September
or of the Grey Heron
flustering to rest
with outstretched shanks
and a fraiking throat
after lonely fishing
on the Ayrshire coast
on a darkblue august evening
("XXXVI," Walk)
White's point of view is unswervingly Transcendentalist
in the root-belief that the individual's relationship to
nature holds the key to reality as well as to unity, since
for him also the idea of a mental-natural correspondence
remains intact. The method leading toward correspondence
involves an awareness of and an attunement to natural
processes:
Natural things cast up by the sea
gradually integrated.
That skeletal branch. A tangle of blue
netting grown into the sand.
The way real thought, real poetry
81
gradually becomes integrated into
the context of life, transforming it.
(White, "A Study of Mountain
and Shore," The Bird Path,
prefatory poem)
For White, however, the original physical "grounding”
occurred not on America’s "virgin territory," but in the
natural landscape of Scotland, reflected in the collection
of poems entitled A Walk Along the Shore, which, he writes,
2 3
"constitutes a kind of summa scotica poetica." In
creating these poems (over fifty in all), White is seeking
to articulate as well as exemplify the poetic process as
it applies to himself, all the while grounding that process
firmly within his native Scottish landscape. The poems are
"periplic," he states in a prefatory note to them--periplic
in the sense that Pound had used the word "periplum." "The
difference is," White continues,
that Pound's matter is world-culture (coming from
Idaho, and not being a Redskin, he didn't have
much choice), whereas the matter of this poem is
autobiographical, the autobiography (mind, flesh
and bones) being situated within a specific cul
tural context. That is one of the advantages
still accruing to the poet in Scotland, he has a
background, a certain cultural space that goes
back a long way, however fragmentary and however
much obscured.
("A Few Signs," p. 3)
The poems originate In the polarities of a self and a
highly particularized natural environment, both, at this
point, alienated from each other:
Kenneth White, "A Few Signs in the Sand " (Prefatory
note to A Walk Along the Shore), unpublished essay, p. 1.
82
living as a boy on the shore
seeing and hearing
the clou
ding and clamouring of gulls
like overwhelming metaphors
or maybe a heron
'na h'aonar ri taobh na tuinne
mar thuigse leatha fhein *s a1 chruinne
alone beside the sea
2k
like a mind alone in the universe
Then, there is a sudden awareness of the natural landscape,
of the miracle of its existence, the awesomeness of its
presence; this recognition is followed by the impulse to
poetry (i.e. , "then a cry"):
and how it began was
there in the womb of the hills
seeing that snowhill
smooring against the sky
rooted there
obscure
amazed
inarticulate
strange
then a cry
("VI," Walk)25
White, "II," Walk. The underscored lines in the
poem are in Gaelic, translated in the two lines following.
2 5
Note that the union of natural (."spooring against .
. .") and mental ("amazed") polarities is rendered manifest
by typographically placing poetry C"then a cry") as their
unifying center. The central metaphor here, as in many of
White's poems, is that of the "birth" of poetry from the
poet's perception of, or penetration into, the natural
world.
83
The poet's understanding that there is a very real spiritu
al correspondence in natural phenomena with the mind of
man, in spite of nature's initial "strangeness," forms the
next circumference in these poems' "periplic" growth. Here,
in the ninth poem, the mute and mutilated trees speak in
physical, symbolic language, which the poet translates into
words:
Canadian firs
their branches lopped
eyes carved in the bark
eyes
a circle white-yellow
surrounding the dark red
centre wood
resin dripping clear and brown
from the eye-wound
and the sap
turning in the air
to a milky blue—
who in the stillness
gazes here
("IX," Walk)
The Transcendentalist "method" is apparent here: first, as
we have just noted, in the deep grounding in nature, with
the accompanying implication of a correspondence between
mental and natural phenomena, and the desire to coordinate
the individual with the natural rhythm. The second step is
to locate the process of poetry within the human mind as
its necessary activating and radiating center, as in
8**
the following poem (number "XI” of Walk):
believing
that the biological
aim of art
is to project around us
the images
the proofs
the manifestations
of a power of synthesis
at one with life
and maintaining life
against solitude
and fragmentation
The poem, as White writes later, helps us to "think in
reality clearly" ("XXXIV," Walk), art’s "biological aim"
being to keep the fleeting vision alive, and, wherever
possible, to preserve it intact. As with Emerson's empha
sis on the silence necessary between moments of inspiration,
there is also much patient waiting in the spaces between
White's poems, not only for his own moments of insight, but
for the time when such insights will be a natural part of
our world:
it will come again
the living thought
certain as those wings
that catch the light
and exact in its loveliness
certain as those wings
and
85
exact in its loveliness
the living thought
it will come again
to the minds
and the hearts of men
in a unified world
CUXVII," Walk)
The third step is to project the knowledge of a possi
ble unity to life, gained only by the difficult creative
generation of symbols with the power to unite contraries,
such as the symbol of amethyst in this sixteenth poem:
the boulder
cut asunder
shows
a blue-gleaming layer of amethyst—
there is a principle
of beauty and order
at the heart of chaos
within life there is life
The symbols become "totems gleaming in the night" ("XLIII,"
Walk) which can prepare for that "new idiome / of far
greater perfection / than all existent languages" which,
White tells us, Urquhart also hoped to provide, for all
"pregnant and ingenious spirits." C"XLI," Walk) The
symbols, however, must always be
exemplary language
subtle as flowers
86
plastic as waves
flexible as twigs
powerful as wind
concentrate as rocks
syncratic
as the self
beautiful as love
("LI," Walk)
The ultimate need is for
a complex symbol
placing the accent
on the union of contraries
stressing
the one in the many
the possible
difficult harmony
in the human conscience
("L,"Walk)
Such a mission as that White has elected to undertake
represents a severe restriction of the so-called "Don Juan
of the creative spirit" which Heller describes. White's
fixed idea seems to be in the pursuit of wholeness, which
2 6
he sometimes calls "reality," sometimes "whiteness";
^ c
White writes in the essay "Into the White World":
"Kant affirmed that the 'noumenal world', as he termed it,
was unknowable, and that the life of man must be one of
practical reason. But it is knowledge of the 'noumenal
world', which we call the white world, that is the passion
ate research of poetry, and its supreme realisation."
(Raster, Spring, 1972)
87
he allows himself to write only that poetry which plays a
part in the process of its discovery. The point of refer
ence is always that of the natural world. However bleak,
however austere, it is a surer guide than anything else we
have:
for it is possible
to live with the rocks
in unity of mind
and perhaps one who knows
even one rock thoroughly
in all its idiosyncracy
and relatedness
to sea and sky
is better fit to speak
to another human being
than one who lives and rots perpetually
in a crowded society
that teaches him
nothing essential
("LIV," Walk)
Yet there is much in White's modern world that differ
entiates it from the world of Whitman's democratic
"comraderie" or from Emerson's calm optimism. Nature, such
as the Transcendentalists knew it, is today a vanishing
phenomenon which, at best, we can now "visit” in the form
of national preserves, and that often for a price; it is
rarely a habit of mind for any of us, as it was for the
Transcendentalists. The cultural landscape has also added
88
such bleak philosophical concepts as that of existential
ism, alienation, and absurdity, while the technological
sphere has brought home to us the very real possibility
that we may blow ourselves out of our collective existence-
both circumstances which further fragment an already
highly fragmented consciousness. Technological advances
seem to have led, not to concomitant spiritual gains, but
to spiritual losses in the same proportion as those
advances; instead of Whitman's "passage to more than India,
there seem to be only more and more passages to India. The
individual as common denominator of the universe has become
the common denominator of individual neuroses, who shares
with other individuals only in biological dispositions
toward certain psychological or physiological states of
being; our spiritual values, beliefs and goals, where
existent, have burrowed so deeply within human subjectivity
as to be mutually exclusive and incomprehensible. The
closest we can come toward a positive philosophical denomi
nator is in the belief that we should, wherever possible,
"live and let live."
My purpose here is not to shore up a heap of truisms,
but to point out clearly the odds Kenneth. White faces in
his choice to embrace the apparently lost causes the Trans
cendentalists stood for. The hleakness of that choice may
account for the great austerity of much of his poetry and
the desolate, if not desolating, landscape of the "white
world." Occasionally, in the extremities of his quest, he
cries out for help, to others who might sustain him, or who
even might understand what he is trying to do:
so Indians Chinese and Eskimos
scientists and fellow-poets
all souls of our delirious earth
grant me help
come succour my brain
I am saying my prayers
for the first time in years
I need everything
("XLIII," Walk)
Unity of mind and soul, self and world, becomes a symbol as
terrifying as it is desirable, with fore-knowledge of the
tremendous sacrifices necessary for its attainment, along
with the laying aside of customs, habits and ease of living
in the social context. Add to this the knowledge that one
may fail utterly to achieve or reflect this unity, and we
grasp the heart of the grand risk which is the measure of
all potentially great art: the poet laying himself on the
line, putting his life's work at stake in the intuition
that the cause he embraces is more than worth the risk, and
that his personal quest has ultimate validity for all human
beings.
There is sometimes in White's poetry the tense auster
ity of the tightrope-walker, for White, unlike Emerson and
Kant before him, does not walk in the hallowed pathways of
90
a presumed moral order, assured that the good and true will
guide him. With collapse of a resonant religious credo
during the nineteenth century, many writers since (among
whom number the Symbolists) have chosen to turn art into
its own aesthetic absolute to occupy the vacuum left by
religion. Yet White, like Nietzsche, seeks to establish
bases other than moral or aesthetic for his guidelines.
Like the Transcendentalists, however, he will not relin
quish the value of ' ’ natural” existence, but attempts to
balance it with the "spiritual” value of poetry. He
chooses the difficult option of walking the fine line of a
highly metaphysically-oriented poetry within and ultimately
for a "naturalized” physical body:
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • f t *
. . . how to order
the signs and the symbols
so they will continue
to form new patterns
developing into
new harmonic wholes
so to keep life alive
in complexity
and complicity
with all of being—
there is only poetry
("I," Walk)
The discovery of poetry as the way to harmony in life
was also the fundamental realization in the concluding
91
lines of Letters from Gourgounel, which is a kind of modern
sequel to Walden, describing in prose the period in 1963
when White moved with his wife into a ramshackle farmhouse
in the Ardeche valley of southern France— another desolate
landscape— in an effort to simplify and renew his life.
The entry for White into the natural world of this valley
seems to have come initially through the people who lived
there, who lived in extremity themselves and who sometimes
acquired qualities of the land they occupied. White writes
of their.:
They do not have a great deal, only barely enough.
It is this bare necessity, the fact that they still
live at the very elbow of existence, that has
preserved in them qualities which have been largely
lost elsewhere.
(Gourgounel, p. *19)
Later, with an awareness of the wealth of "clews" supplied
by nature, White sees that poetry is the way to contain
and carry to others the vision of unity it has helped him
attain, and to carry it as nature would offer it, "not like
a pitcher, but like the bed of a stream":
And I . . . knew the glory of the poet, . . . who
writes and speaks from the heart of nature, his
greater home, and sends its living streams through
the world.
(Gourgounel, p. 1U1)
Yet even in White's poetry--or perhaps especially
here— as with the other philosopher-poets studied, poetry
sometimes acts like a mirror in the sun--capable of reflect
ing a vision intact, but also capable of turning directly
92
onto the sun and becoming suddenly incandescent, reflecting
not the objects around it, but itself, as a pure, blinding
immanence. Perhaps this "whiteness" is the ultimate testa
ment to poetry's unitive power on life, for we behold the
poet before us— the mirror turned lamp— transformed by and
into his own vision:
I have come again into my own
the incandescence
thought reduced almost to nothing
lost in the immanence
(White, "On Bird Island,"
The Bird Path, fourteenth
poem)
93
III. DIONYSIAN MAN
. . .— mit beiden Fiissen stehe
ich sicher auf diesem Grunde,—
auf einem ewigen Grunde, auf
hartem Urgesteine, auf diesem
hSchsten h&rtesten Urgebirge,
zu dem a He Winde kommen als
zur Wetterscheide, fragend nach
wo? und woher? und wohinaus?
-Nietzsche1
i.
In a poem published in 1968 entitled "Bird and
Mammal," Kenneth White contrasted the Transcendentalists,
personified in Whitman, with Nietzsche. Whitman, enamoured
of the earth's (and his own) sheer sensuous existence,
becomes the "mammal":
Walt Whitman
padding along an eternal shore
lolling in voluptuous tides
the sun on his bare brown shoulders
padding along an eternal shore
bellowing
in sheer contentment
Nietzsche is portrayed in basically the same manner in
which Zarathustra, in the epigraph which opens this chapter,
had described himself:
Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei BStnden, ed. Karl
Schlechta (Munich: Carl Hanaer, , 2:4lQ. All
subsequent references to Nietzsche's work are from this
source, with a colon separating the volume number from the
page number.
94
Nietzsche
perched high, very high
in the cold air
and the flames of the sun
perched high
squawking in all directions 2
trying to find out where to go
For our purposes in understanding Kenneth White's develop
ment as a poet, the juxtaposition of Whitman to Nietzsche
in the preceding poem becomes a significant one. We might
interpret that juxtaposition by saying that the two men
shared a certain "terrestrial” element (one being "bird,"
the other "mammal"), although Whitman chose the low road,
reaching his goals by grounding his knowledge in sense
perceptions, and Nietzsche, the questing and questioning
philosopher, chose the high road, in "the flames of the
sun," discontented with all existing knowledge and systems
of knowledge, and always seeking to go beyond the limits of
the known world. Kenneth White has never rejected the
methods of either writer, but has rather sought to combine
in his own work the best traits of each. We may therefore
see his movement from the Transcendentalists to Nietzsche
as part of a continuing process in his development, going
from earth-matter, once again, but in a new way, straight
up and "through to the white."
5---------------
Kenneth White, "Rird and Hammal," The Most Difficult
Area CLondon: Cape Soliard, 1968); this poem is the third
Xn a sub-section of the book entitled "Signs and Situations."
95
For the poetry of Kenneth White, Nietzsche's philoso
phy is seminal, and a recognition of Nietzsche's signifi
cance is perhaps the single most important clue leading
toward an understanding of that poetry. "A consistently
post-Nietzschean naturalism" is the way Michael Hamburger,
3
in The Truth of Poetry, describes Kenneth White's poetry.
An exploration of what is implied by this "Nietzschean
naturalism" comprises the first section of the present
chapter, followed in the section by a discussion of the
ways in which White's work can be illuminated in the light
of those concepts.
Ach, es gab immer so viel verflogene Tugend!
Ftihrt, gleich mir, die verflogene Tugend
zur Erde zurtick— ja, zuriick zu Leib und Leben:
dass sie der Erde ihren Sinn gebe, einen
Menschen-Sinn. '
-Nietzsche (2:338)
ii.
To recoup all the energies of the individual— psychic,
physical and otherw.ise--for the creative task of living:
Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry CNew York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., i9.7Q), p. 295. The term
"post-Nietzschean naturalism," as used in the present chap~
ter, involves a fundamental shift from the essentially
religious view of nature held by the Transcendentalisms.
It shares little or nothing in common with, the literary
movement known as "Naturalism," however. Rather, it seems
to be related to a kind of psychic "vitalism" grounded in
the natural or phenomenal world.
96
that, in capsule, seems to be both Nietzsche's and Kenneth
White's mission. This was no small task., as Nietzsche had
first seen it, involving nothing less than the total
"Umwertung aller Werte" (2:1235), followed, if possible, by
the creation of more earth-centered and therefore, he felt,
more meaningful, codes of living. Believing that "Uber-
zeugungen sind GefMngnisse" (2:1221), he had from the
outset to be wary in his method of attack and investigation.
Nothing reflects that wariness more clearly than does his
aphoristic style, in which each microcosmic fragment
represents, as Walter Kaufmann notes, a kind of "thought
experiment"; in this way, an idea or series of ideas is
approached by successive re-viewings from many different
angles, consequently making "impossible the systematic
I t
approach which is usually adopted with other thinkers."
This "monadologic" method, Kaufmann believes, also repre
sents Nietzsche's "brutally frank admission that today
hardly anyone can offer more than scattered profound in
sights or single beautiful sentences," to which Kaufmann
adds, "— and his writings abound in both." (Nietzsche, p. 65)
Unlike the writings of his predecessors Kant and
Hegel, Nietzsche's expressions seem to grow directly out of
Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher. Psycholo
gist | Antichrist (New York": Meridian Books, J.9&0, -1B63),
p. 62. We might note that the aphoristic style is also the
mode of expression of the Celts, Surrealists, Transcenden-
talists, and Eastern writers, as well as Kenneth White.
97
his physiology, with all the body's accompanying quick
silver reverses, caprices, exultations, and, by no means
least, morbid states of depression. The critical eye,
however, remains keen and penetrating, even when the angle
of its vision shifts violently. His style is a remarkable
admixture of eighteenth century rationalism with the
utterly modern psychologies of the "spontaneous."
"Schreibe mit Blut," Zarathustra admonishes his followers,
"und du wirst erfahren, dass Blut Geist ist"; (2 :305)
Nietzsche's writings do indeed seem to be written with his
own blood. Yet Nietzsche remains, and Kenneth White follows
him in this, one of the first modern thinkers consistently
to emphasize and illustrate the intimate connections of
physiology with so-called "abstract" or pure thought:
"Der reine Geist," he wrote in Per Antichrist, "ist die
reine Luge": (2:1170) "rechnen wir das Nervensystem und die
Sinne ab, die 'sterbliche Hiille', so verrechnen wir uns —
weiter nichts!" (2:1175) Moreover, a concept was valuable
to him to the degree in which it could be lived: "Ver-
suchen wir's!" (2:72) was his method of testing the veridi-
cality of a statement or theory. Significant in its
parallels to White, Zarathustra, that dionysian dancer of
dancers, regarded his bodily exultations not as a release
from the weight of his message, but the essence of the
message itself: "Nur im Tanze weiss ich der hfichsten Pinge
zu reden." (2:369) This physiological aspect of Nietzsche's
style is one of its closest links with the writings of
Kenneth White, and remains one of the fundamental premises
of Nietzsche's "naturalism": that writing remain as close
as possible to the rhythms of the body, without deluding
itself in the belief that the body has somehow been
"transcended."
Another major step in the process of an "Umwertung
aller Werte" involved getting rid of fossil-values, built
on antiquated conceptions of man's self-image, conceptions
which are usually, as Nietzsche attempts to prove by his
remarkable sallies into depth psychology, the hideously
distorted fruit of an emotionally twisted person or group
of people or race. Christianity represented for Nietzsche
(although not for White) the major antiquated stumbling
block— the quintessential inversion of values— that had to
be overthrown and demolished once and for all.5 He rides
into the fray like an Achilles— or an Antichrist— holding
poised his "philosophical hammer."
In The Antichrist, railing against what he calls "die
Lilge der 'sittlichen Weltordnung'" (2:1186), Nietzsche
charges Christianity with being the "Widerspruch des
Lebens" (2:1178), characterized by the "Hass gegen die
Sinne." (2:1181) The major offender in his eyes is not
Jesus, whom Nietzsche believes was misunderstood, but Paul,
For White, the major obstacle seems to lie in our
decayed and ossified cultural institutions; Christianity,
apparently, is now too weak even to be an adversary.
99
who comes in for all the vituperative attack in Nietzsche's
armory. Paul epitomizes for Nietzsche the sickness of the
Christian church in being consumed by "ressentiment" at the
death on the cross, which threatened to negate all of
Christ's life; so Paul and the apostles invented a justifi
cation for Christ's death with the doctrine of redemption:
Christ had died that we might be saved from our sins (and
senses, Nietzsche might add). The doctrine of faith, he
felt, placed a seal on the breach between the two worlds,
whereby Christianity robbed this world of its meaning.
The underlying cause for all of Nietzsche's objections
to Christianity is in the latter's "unnaturalism"— "der
vollkommen schauerliche Tatbestand, dass die Widernatur
selbst als Moral die hochsten Ehren empfing." (2:1157)
But in order to comprehend Nietzsche's objection in the
sense he intended, we must first know what he means by
"nature"— whether he speaks of an abandonment to whatever
feels good, or of a return to primitivism, or something
else. In Gotzen-Dammerung (1889) Nietzsche himself
clarifies his meaning somewhat:
— Auch ich rede von "Rtickkehr zur Natur," obwohl
es eigentlich nicht ein Zurttckgehn, sondern ein
Hinaufkommen ist— .... C2;10.23)
In an earlier essay on Schopenhauer (.187*0, he had stated
(almost in opposition to the yiew held by the Transcenden-
talists) that Nature itself proceeded in a purposeless
fashion, and needed our human help to realize its own
100
goals. (1:326) In this respect, as Kaufmann has noted,
Nature represents the chaotic or Dionysian element, and the
rational faculty in man, the Apollonian. When Nietzsche
stresses the idea of an ascent (Hinaufkommen) to Nature, he
is implying the transformation of Nature by man, or especi
ally, the transformation of nature within man, leading to
the fulfillment of both--or self-fulfillment of the one,
in the sense that the two things are part of each other and
require a ''self-overcoming” to achieve wholeness. Kaufmann
adds:
When man tries to master his animal nature and
sublimate his impulses, he is only exemplifying
a striving which is essentially natural.
(Nietzsche, p. 225)
In fact, it is this combination of Dionysian and Apollonian
elements, along with the sublimation of the chaotic element
into the ordered, which is both Nietzsche's and White's
basic conception of Nature, as well as being Nietzsche's
conception of the will to power (as we shall see), which
also finds its basis in "naturalism." The two primal life
forces, Dionysian and Apollonian, must co-exist and eventu
ally unite, with one gradually absorbing and transforming
the other; this process, as we shall see, becomes an inex
tricable part of Kenneth. White's own creatiye method.
Nietzsche's method, notes Kaufmann, is one of "dialectical
monism," the monism being the result of a process of
transformation and self-overcoming. (Nietzsche, p. 209)
101
The Ubermensch (whose meaning would not be lost if we
substituted for it the word "poet") is himself the fruit of
this slow transformation, and cannot be viewed apart from
what Kaufmann calls the ubiquitous "Uberwindungsmotiv"
in Nietzsche’s writings. (Nietzsche, p. 186) The Uber-
mensch is one who has "gone under" (Untergang) and eventu
ally "overcome" (tiberwunden)— not a world or a race— but
himself. Out of joy in the knowledge of the Ubermensch, as
Zarathustra shows, can come the revelation of the secret
that everything recurs eternally: Ubermensch, mediocre
men, events, wisdoms, stupidities, joys and sufferings— all
happen again and again, and the Ubermensch welcomes even
this. In fact, it is the terrible knowledge of the eternal
recurrence of all things which gives the strongest man (the
one it does not destroy) his greatest impetus to creative
life. Only the one closest to being the Ubermensch, who
has mastered himself and the principle of recurrence, can
joyfully accept this amor fati, which Nietzsche tells us
(in Nietzsche contra Wagner and elsewhere) is his own
inmost nature. It is a knowledge which makes man into a
dancer who can embrace passionately the immediate moment,
since none realizes as he does that the yalue of the
present is the yalue of life itself.
What force has impelled the Nietzschean man first to
overcome himself, and then to accept and even love his
fatal destiny? It is, Nietzsche says, the will to power
102
(interpreted by Kenneth White as the will to self-
realization) ; this will, unlike the Darwinian one of
survival, is essentially creative, having undertaken the
creative task of transforming itself, and is the distin
guishing trait of the strongest men. Yet, Nietzsche con
tends, if it is to realize itself, it must also be first
transformed or sublimated along other channels: it must
overcome itself.
Whether we, like Thomas Mann, view Nietzsche's
naturalistic amor fati and its concomitant codes for living
as "... a bloody kind of self-mutilation, self-torment,
C
moralism," or whether we agree with Walter Kaufmann that
Nietzsche's unique conception of the will to power "...
may represent one of the few great philosophic ideas of all
time" (Nietzsche, p. 12), it nevertheless remains a fact
that the basic thrust of Nietzsche's philosophy intends to
bestow a sense of unity and creative energy to the indivi
dual, where Nietzsche felt unity and energy properly
belonged, in order that the individual might profit most
fully from the living of his own life:
Seinem Charakter "Stil geben"— eine grosse und seltne
Kunst! Sie iibt der, welcher alles Ubersieht, was
seine Natur an KrSften und Schw8. 0h.en hietet, und
es dann einem ktinstlerlschen Plane einftigt, bis ein
jedes als Kunst und Yernunft erscheint ....
— -g - — — ..............- -
Thomas Mann, "Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of
Contemporary Events," in Nietzsche: A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. Robert C. Solomon (New York: Anchor,
TS73T7 p.^SS'f.
103
--Es werden die starken, herrschsiichtigen Naturen
sein, welche in einem solchen Zwange, in einer
solchen Gebundenheit und Vollendung unter dem
eignen Gesetz ihre feinste Freude geniessen;
. . . . (2:169)
I think maybe I am a poet; I think
also, I am, in some perhaps unortho
dox sense, a teacher. I profoundly
enjoy (my) life (in all its darkness
and light) and I want to propagate
that joyance. -
-Kenneth White
iii.
Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo that all his writings
after Jenseits von Gut und Bdse would be "fish hooks"
(Angelhaken). He had had to content himself with the idea
of "fish hooks," knowing that he would never in fact see
his ideas embodied beyond the ecstatic visions he imagined,
most notably in Zarathustra. Kenneth White, while not
employing metaphors of such a barbed and aggressive nature
as Nietzsche, also sees his writings as a means of intensi
fying and propagating his "joyance" (Coleridge’s term) in
life. His own characteristic metaphors, many of which are
remarkably similar to those of Nietzsche, are those of a
"dancer" who by his movement creates a field of energy,
drawing others into their own dance. The dance, of course,
-
Kenneth White, "Autobiography," unpublished essay
(1968), p. 6.
icm
implies the act of living, as well as poetry, and the
significant difference between White’s and Nietzsche’s
conceptions of their writings is that in White's work the
writings are the signposts of journeys made in fact and
flesh, as wall as mind.
The two writers do nevertheless share many common
goals and similar traits, not the least notable of which is
their prose style. White's prose, like Nietzsche's, is not
consciously systematic, but more nearly aphoristic in
structure (something like the "abrupt little books," he
g
writes somewhere, that he likes). He often intersperses
his own statements with a series of lustres or quotations
from other writers, to the point that the writing actually
overflows into meaning by an accumulation of analogies to
whatever point he is making. The interruptions, however,
often initially startle or distract the analytical reader,
who is forced into responsive rather than analytical
thought, although not without first a reaction of bewilder
ment, irritation, or delight— or sometimes all three at
once. A good example of this might be in the editorial
comment White included in the third issue of Feuillage
(the campus literary magazine in Pau, Prance, in April of
1968). After mentioning that this third issue would in some
g
White's and Nietzsche's styles, like Emerson's,
Breton's and Celtic writings, all tend to be highly aphor
istic for essentially the seme reason— because they cannot
articulate what they want to say in more discursive prose.
105
ways round out a trinity, White continues by saying that
he wants to convey an idea of the Holy Ghost, only: "We’re
putting a different meaning to it. See it this way":
The other day (Sunday, April 21st, to be exact),
while crazy bastards were buzzing round the circuit
of Pau in competition for the International Cretin
Trophy or something like that, I took a shower, put
on my blue-jeans (.along with the orange socks Steeve
gave me) and my favorite sky-blue shirt (the colour
of the Arapaho Ghost Dance Shirt— the Red Indians
really knew something about the Holy Ghost--which
an Arapaho Indian saw in a dream, and later made
for himself: blue-dyed animal skin, with painted
stars and thunderbirds), and made off along the
Bayonne road on my bike (in fact Jacques Surel's
bike).
(Feuillage, p. 1)
This particular passage, growing outward in spider-web
fashion, then leads the reader to the point in the journey
when White is racing along on his bike intoning a sacred,
"There's no one inside this shirt but Allah!" The "dance"
quickens:
Fifteen or so kilometres out from Orthez, it
starts to rain; it starts to pour. I'm soaked,
I'm drenched. I laugh crazily, I love it. I've
?ot the rain in my face (I'm thinking of that Red
ndian), I've got it everywhere! I think briefly
of Basho's: Travels of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton—
but mostly I'm just moving under the rain, enjoying
it immensely. I keep with it all the remaining
twenty-five kilometres into Pau. Am I wet! Am
I happy!
(Feuillage, pp. 2-3)
The spirit in the preceding lines is that of Dionysus; it
intends to convey a contagious sense of well-heing and
sheer animal exuberance, as well as a sense of the sacred.
In Jargon Paper No. I, issued at Glasgow University in
106
December of 196>+, White writes:
For Nietzsche, philosophy was the expression of
an extraordinary high soul-state; I'd say the same
thing for poetry— poetry, philosophy, it doesn't
matter what you call it. (p. 1)
This "extraordinary high soul-state" also characterizes
much of White's prose, but with a difference: the prose is
freer, more lawless and reckless than the poetry (which
we'll look at later), and is intended as a complement to
it, and in some ways, perhaps even as a release from it.
Through it, as through Nietzsche's writing, runs a strong
vein of adolescent and egoistic energy, which perhaps lends
to it one aspect of its charm. While smiling indulgently
at its guileless arrogance (if we are at all in its spirit)*
at the apparent immaturity of the emotions expressed, we
are struck as if on the mark by the not-so-immature ideas
behind these emotions. Note this example from Gourgounel,
in which the poet, like a turning prism, shifts from monkey
to oriental sage, and back and forth again, the transforma
tion not hindered by use cf the pun on "peal/peel" and the
connotations of "banana":
Major problems I leave alone until they become
pregnant and give birth to a lpt of minor ones. I
then handle the minor ones. And the major one
becomes my friend ....
. . . C Others.7 kept striking at cold iron, and
thought that spark-making was meritorious. I wait--
the iron heats. And I , iorge it into something
round as a bell. It then gives music. When those
others come to a wearisome conclusion about the
hardness of life, I peal a hosanna.
Sometimes I peel a banana, while they are out
hunting bears. I eat my banana, and am dancing
IQ7
while they are hunting, cooking, swallowing and
digesting and sleeping. They cannot understand
that the real strength of the hear is in the
banana.
When they ask me my opinion, I say: banana,
banana. They say I am not serious. . . .9
The success of such efforts perhaps indicates that
none of us is far from the appeal— and the state--of juven
ility. Such energy releases a kind of power at the same
time it generates power in the human ego. Intellectually
no blushing-bride, White is willing to be consciously
egoistic, in the broad sense of the term, since such a
concentration of power (cf. "There’s no one inside this
shirt but Allah.’”) leads to "dancing.” In the initial
issue of The Feathered Egg (literary journal of Charles V
in Paris, in April of 1972), White includes an "Eggitorial”
(being, like Nietzsche, an inveterate punster) to explain
why all the articles in this issue are written by himself:
At first sight, this initial number of The
Feathered Egg will look like an ego-trip. And on
second sight too, because that's what it is. There
are reasons for that £"time, availability of arti
cles, etc. J .... The whole of Nietzschean
philosophy ... is an ego-trip but, as Nietzsche
says himself, before dismissing any one man’s
theory and practice as being "exclusive” . . . ,
you’ve got to consider whether or not it opens up
perspectives, reveals a field of energy• it is
Letter, in short, to haye an ego . . . with per
spectives than no perspectives at all, only, say,
a monotonous marking -1 ime, an "ohjectiye4 1 discourse
that ends up by numbing the hrain, and what the
Ch'an men call "dragging your corpse around."
CThe Feathered Egg, p. 1)
- g
Kenneth White, Letters from gourgounel (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1966), p. 90. " *
108
As such, this egoism acts as an affirmation and propagation
of life, in which emotions and bodily exultations play no
small part. Before we continue with a study of what White
does with this energy besides "dance,” let us cite a final
example of his wit in action— this time based on the hush-
hush innuendoes of sexuality (ultimately the source of all
"dancing" energy). In this story, the "barbarous Scot"
encounters a prim Englishwoman in the dining car of a
train en route from London to Scotland. They talk:
"May I ask what your work is?"
"I'm a golf-course attendant," I say.
"Oh, how nice," she says ....
"A lot of balls," I say.
"What?" says the Englishwoman.
"I say there's a wheen balls knocking about,
you know, the wee white balls that they knock
about, and that they try to put into the ground,
you know, the wee hole in the ground."
"Oh, yes," says the Englishwoman.
"Of course the hole must be as wee as the ball
is wee," I say. "You understand. There are, as
you might say, varying degrees of weeness. A great
many people think that wee is always wee. But there
is wee, and there is wee-wee," I say.
"Oh, yes," says the Englishwoman faintly.
At which point the conversation shifts abruptly to one of
localities:
"Do you know Largs?" she says.
"Madam, I was born there .... Kelburn golf-
course. And the first thing I saw when I opened
my eyes was a wee white ball.”
"Oh, how lovely," she says.
"You've said a mouthful, Madam," I say, "I
swallowed it."
"Oh, how awful," says the Englishwoman.
"I had a precocious Adam's apple for weeks ....
All the other infants called me Daddy . . . ."
(The Feathered Eek. Anril,
lgrSTPp. i r- T2T^
109
With this salubrious precocity in mind, let us now see in
what other areas White's dionysian energies are moving.
Like Nietzsche, one of White's major concerns is with
the recoupment of all the psychic and physical force possi
ble, in the hope of lodging it firmly within the individual
mind and body. He looks around to see in which directions
these energies are being dissipated, and then proceeds to
attack the causes, hopefully to destroy them, and replace
them with something else: "We must renew our relations
with this world . . . ," he writes, "found and ground it in
10
our own life, in our own earth." The ultimate concern,
as with Nietzsche, is with values.
The role of attack, destruction, and re-creation is
assigned to what White, following Nietzsche, calls "Hyper
boreans." At the beginning of Der Antichrist Nietzsche
wrote:
.... Wir sind Hyperboreer— wir wissen gut genug,
wie abseits wir leben. "Weder zu Lande noch zu
Wasser wirst du den Weg zu den Hyperboreern finden:"
das hat schon Pindar von uns gewusst. Jenseits
des Nordens, des Eises, des Todes— unser Leben,
unser Gltlck .... Wir haben das Gldck entdeckt,
wir wissen den Weg, wir fanden den Ausgang aus
ganzen Jahrtausenden des Labyrinths ....
.... Lieber im Eise leben, als unter modernen
Tugenden und andern SUdwinden! (2:1165)
.... Hier Arzt sein, hier unerbittlich sein,
hier das Messer ftthren— das ^ehfirt zu uns, das ist
unsre Art Menschenliebe, damit sind wir Philosophen,
wir Hyperboreer! (2:1169)
- Tq
Kenneth White, "Open Letter to All Hyperboreans,"
Raster (Autumn, 1970), p. 9.
110
Kenneth White picks up this motif in his essay "Open Letter
to All Hyperboreans," redefining the modern Hyperborean,
both mythopoeically and pragmatically; he is first of all
. . . the man who, on the basis of an instinctive
revolt, has undertaken a radical criticism of our
civilisation, and found it badly wanting--and who,
further, is engaged in travelling the way to
something else.
He is also part of
. . . that north-western circumpolar cultural and
psycho-mental complex which the early Greeks had
wind of, but which was later obscured by helleni-
zation, romanization, and Christianization--and
which is the cultural area to which the British
Isles— rendered progressively more brutish through
the domination of various power-establishments--
initially and fundamentally belongs.
("Hyperboreans," p. 8)
In this essay, the basic critique of British culture
centers on its "groundlessness," its "trivialization of
thought and life," its "anti-intellectualism and low-
pressured intellectual climate" (p. *+), to the degree that
the most alive poets, in the face of such groundlessness,
choose to exile themselves (Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats) or must
become, like Dylan Thomas, a kind of Cosmic Clown, "perhaps
never reaching anything like his full development as a
poet." (p. 1) Antipodal to this groundlessness is White's
introduction, by a few "individual initiators and inspir-
ers," of a "practical metaphysics," in which thoughts and
experiences might become coordinated in a meaningful way,
"through whatever fracture zones and difficulties may occur,
to an essential unity." (p. 5)
111
The goal is for a real culture, and the process of its
attainment seems to be White’s major social objective, for
(as he writes elsewhere) ". . . it is difficult for one
man's mind to make it alone. There has to be a cultural
background, and perhaps even a special discipline within
11
the culture.” "What is the conception of culture that
prevails in our society?" he asks, answering:
It is the objective conception, which sees culture
as something separate from the man who makes it,
which sees it as an object to be acquired, and to
be dispensed. This cuitureUivorcea from human
action . . . sees literature, e.ja ; . , as a mass of
books to be appreciated (mostly just learned
about), making no attempt to get to the roots
of the creative act within an existential situ
ation. Books are treated, rather than under
stood ....
(Jargon Paper No. II,
Fe bruaryi T5 SI-----
Real culture, by contrast, would mean "the expression of
man's total nature," which centers "more particularly, in
his desires," in
. . . the substitution of the creative self for
the habitual self. For all creators create out
of their desires. And the great desire is the
desire for total life.
CJargon Paper No. II)
Thus, culture is linked to creativity, which in turn is
grounded in human desires; rather than being an "objective"
something, dispensed like pills, culture grows out of the
instincts of the individual. Naturally, if they are to be
--------------
Kenneth White, "Poetry and the Tribe, Part I,"
Raster (Spring, 1971), p. 26.
112
strong enough to be the sources of creativity, these
instincts must not be stifled; they must act as the
building-blocks of culture. The shift would ultimately be
toward a greater living concern with, say, literature,
wherein the "word" can be seen "as an act of violence.”
("Hyperboreans," p. 4)
As "Hyperborean" himself, White has consistently
sought to bring about this shift in culture, or at least,
to get the shift underway. Experience showed him that
. . . it was better not ... to abandon the uni
versities, which were going to be there for a while
yet, but to work from within them.
(The Feathered Egg, April,
1972 , pp. IF-15)
So that successively, first in Glasgow, then Pau, then
Paris, he initiated small underground movements to generate
creative energy. The call tc membership in the first among
these, the Jargon Group at Glasgow, reflects well the
general tone prevalent in them all. The flyer (circulated
in 1964) reads:
THE JARGON GROUP
is a set of individuals, a bringing-together of
elements of revolt, negation ana affirmation,
outwith any fixed organization or line, its “ aim
Being simply more shared li^es an increase of
individuality and the beginnings of a live commu
nity . . . . Tf1 you arecrazy7 monomaniac,
rebellious, unbritish, sacrilegious, unadjusted,
uncivilized, chaotic, anafrchic (etc. . . .) or
just interested, come along to the Jargon Group
at 89 daJciield Avenue, oh alternate Mondays, at
" * ^
(the entire statement is
underlined in the original)
113
It is his hope that such marginal, underground groups will
someday widen into a movement, which will in turn become a
cultural revolution, leading to a truly "creative univer
sity" which would involve
... a co-ordinated study of human culture which,
instead of leaving the student floundering about,
or bogged down, in a cultural mess, will bring him
to the point where he can begin seeking creatively
on his own (and not just write another damned
thesis).
("Towards a Creative Univer
sity," The Feathered Egg,
January, id1 ?3, p. * + 2)
It would be, apparently, a place to study creators and to
create oneself (in both senses), the "awakening of desire
and conscience, and an understanding of its expression in
ever-renewed, ever-deepening forms." ("A Note on Methodolo
gy*” Egg, Jan., '73, p. 22) The movement would be toward
unifying and simplifying on every level:
Studying literature (like creating it) implies
the movement from complexity (the diversified use
of all the strings) to a highly integrated and
inflammatory simplicity (which comes from seeing
into one's-self).
("Methodology," p. 21)
In sum:
The energies involved in creation, the struc
tures (linguistic, psychological, sociological)
they encounter, the possible social insertions
of these energies in new forms, the ultimate
possibilities of living-in-the-world, living-on-
the-earth— that, in general terms ... is what
it is all about.
("Methodology," p. 22)
The idea is practicable, at least on a small scale, as
shown by the early efforts at Glasgow, Pau and Paris. At
114
present, the large scale movement remains germinal— possible
rather than probable— a shadow in the minds of those who
understand what it might become:
The Creative University must situate itself (as a
kind of ghost) within the existent institutions,
and pursue its work there.
("Creative University," p. t f * + )
The goals of the Creative University are inseparable
from the goals of the poet, who is working just one step
beyond the former— that is, seeking to create forms, struc
tures , myths, which would revitalize the cultural and
intellectual climate. All who participate in the Creative
University share in his quest. For White, this unifying
and revitalizing myth, which he calls the desire for the
"white world"— a total world experience blending all ele
ments of human consciousness and sub-consciousness— can
only grow out of
... an experience, centering on the real body
. . . , the principle experience of poetry, with
out which no real poetry exists.12
Like the process of education itself, the creation of the
myth starts with the flesh (eros) and leads to the cosmic
(logos). The connecting link between the two is likened to
the intuitive experience of haiku poetry, wherein an immedi
ate sensuous impression, properly modulated, acts as a
catalyst in the sudden perception of being (ontology).
- r y ■
Kenneth White, "Into the White World," Raster
(Spring, 1972), p. 6.
115
Poets, as pioneers in this terrain of being, become "onto
logical heroes" for whom "the question of poetry is ... a
question of . . . knowledge of a world"; ("White World,"
p. 9) as White sees it, for both the student of the Crea
tive University and the poet, "the only categories worth
bothering about are degrees of being" (Jargon No. I), that
is, the stages in the process leading toward the "white
world."
It is toward the exploration of this "ontological
landscape" that we now turn.
In Zarathustra Nietzsche indicates that the man who
would become "ein aus sich rollendes Rad" (2:29*+) must pass
through three progressive stages to arrive at this state of
spontaneous creativity: first he must become a beast of
burden ("das Kamel"), accepting passively all that is
heaped upon him; then comes the period of revolt:
... in der einsamsten WUste geschieht die zweite
Verwandlung: zum Lowen wird hier der Geist, Frei-
heit will er sich erbeuten und Herr sein in seiner
eignen Wviste.
Seinen letzten Herrn sucht er sich hier: feind
will er ihm werden und seinem letzten Gotte, um
Sieg will er mit dem grossen Drachen ringen.
. . . "Du-sollst" heisst der grosse Drache.
(2:293-94)
Once the dragon of "thou shalt" has been vanquished, the
third metamorphosis occurs: to "das Kind," representing a
creative "heiliges Ja-sagen":
. . . seinen Willen will nun der Geist, seine Welt
gewinnt sich der Weltverlorene. (2:294)
116
Kenneth White writes that he read deeply in Nietzsche
while in Munich in 1957 , in "a shack on the banks of the
icy, fast-flowing Isar" ("Autobiography,” p. 3), where he
too seems to have been undergoing an exorcism of "dragons";
he writes in Gourgounel of this period:
... I was desperate then for light, waiting for
the fiery magnificat, for sunrise in hell. I
painted on the cardboard that lined the walls of
my room .... By the end of the month I was
living in a circus. A circus of dragons. I
painted nothing but dragons, (p. 58)
Still, the struggle with dragons was not his hardest. In
another context, White quotes D. H. Lawrence (from the
essay "Democracy") in a statement highly reminiscent of
Nietzsche's third spiritual phase: "The coming into full
spontaneous being," Lawrence writes, "is the most difficult
13
thing of all." The poets, the "ontological heroes," are
the ones who must explore this "most difficult" area.
White writes:
The question is: how to relate to the desert
Once you've got through to it.
The outer desert, and the inner desert.
If poetry doesn't get through to this,
it's just a lot of literature. 1* +
The "desert," by reversal of images, can also be the "cold
world" of the Hyperboreans— the new, and ultimately most
Kenneth White, "Letter to an Old Calligrapher,"
unpublished essay (1968), p. 5.
14
Kenneth White, "American Space," notes on American
literature, unpublished (1972), p. 3.
117
fundamental, ontological landscape the poet will encounter.
Entering it is his period of "Untergang," his initiation
into the vast emptiness of life— or, in Nietzsche's terms,
into the knowledge of its purposeless eternal recurrence—
where, White tells us, "the search for self-transcendence
sometimes comes close to self-annihilation." ("Calligra
pher," p. 8) If it does not destroy the man, it will turn
him into a creator.
The Most Difficult Area (1968), in fact, is the title
of one of White's books, whose poems are the signposts of
the journey into "full spontaneous being." The book's
first poem, entitled "The Crab Nebula," evokes the awesome
fear encountered by the poet in the first stages of this
formless, fertile state:
in this lighted chaos I
no longer think or feel but am
involved in this swirling matter
the form I was no longer holding me
the form I will be not even imagined
The second poem, "Heron of the Snows," hauntingly questions
the ability of art to penetrate in any way beyond the gulf
of emptiness.15 The objective work of art (in this poem,
a "Heron of the Snows / on a Frost-covered Branch,"
painted in China in the tenth century), even if it
contains or represents insights ipto a world of meaning
^ — 15
Nietzsche, in Geburt der Tragfidie, made the now-
famous declaration that life could Be justified only as an
aesthetic phenomenon— that is, through art; he was later
to question that it could be justified even on these
grounds.
118
beyond itself, does not or cannot communicate those
insights:
on the river branch, the heron
like the ghost of an answer
balances in the wind
and stares at the questioning world
In the third poem of Most Difficult Area, "Autobio
graphy 2 9," the poet looks deeply into human life, search
ing intently for some basis which might give existence
value or meaning outside itself; he finds none. He is left
with existence alone, stripped of any ultimate meaning,
seeing each human life as only a "fast fine curve of light"
in the emptiness, signifying nothing beyond itself and
unable in any way to give light to the deeper darkness
within:
Each star
in its own sudden fire
blazes
or shoots
in a fast fine curve of light
over the breathing emptiness
and leaves me
alone by the rock
or stumbling
groping my way
through the undergrowth
with only
the feeling of existence
as it trembles in an animal’s belly
With such a knowledge of "existence" the poet has
reached one of the furthest limits possible; yet immediate
ly after "Autobiography 29" comes a poem representing still
another utmost extremity— that of a meaningless, wordless
119
ecstasy--the pinnacle of being, which can also be the
pinnacle of nothingness, where the poet vacillates between
the two, knowing that there can be no going beyond this
point:
Arrived at this point
where the whiteness is manifest
here in the mountains
where the coldness my element
surrounds me with eternity
arrived at this point
the high crest of nothingness
where the ”1” has no meaning
and the self is ecstatically
alone with its aloneness
shall I blow out my brains?
("Mountain and Glacier World,"
fourth poem, Difficult Area)
Thereafter the poet knows the fear of death (’ ’ Timor
Mortis," the fifth poem) and homeless wanderings of the
spirit ("The Wandering Jew," sixth poem). Yet he knows
also the "icy ecstasy" ("Beinn Airidh Charr," eighth poem)
at the austere limits he has reached, and knows that some
how this state of the "Great Monotony" holds for him the
"lonely sign" he seeks:
Walking in the great monotony
no music now or harmony
only the naked life-sense
and the wind of silence
eros and logos here conjoined
long dark-blue sea and quiet sand
a gull's wing makes a lonely sign
in the night of meanings: a dawn
("In the Great Monotony,"
ninth poem)
120
In the eleventh poem, "Silences," nature, in the form
of the expiring tide, seems to give "the ghost of an
answer." It too has "grappled" and "struggled" with that
"greater silence," and in the moment of greatest extremity,
at the limits of existence, it finds a voice— at once the
sound of its struggle and a victory over its "silence":
on this white rough rockiness
still salt“glistening
listen with all hands
listen: it is grappling
with the greater silence
with the air, struggling
for noise, hardly any
but enough, the sharpest
deepest cutting-into-the-quick
with sudden meaning. . . .
At the limits of saying the poet finds a voice:
At the limits of saying
in the eros-silence
alone with the alone
at the limits of saying
the brain empty and quiet
like shell and like stone
at the limits of saying
the soul flies to the mouth
and the poem is born
("At the limits of saying,"
twelfth poem)
Then the title poem of the book (number thirteen) sets up a
dialogue, in the form of a litany, between poet and nature,
in which the phrase "to attain the most difficult area"
serves in a dual sense, qualifying both statements follow
ing it (in the sense of "in order to attain . . ."), and
preceding it (in the sense of "the result of the effort to
121
attain . . . "); for example, in this segment:
to attain the most difficult area
bird skeleton found this day on the moor
flight and flesh in the ultimate nakedness
to attain the most difficult area
The "flight and flesh" of the perished animal are a sign
and stimulus to the poet on his own similar journey into
"ultimate nakedness," as well as a reminder that his
struggle too may destroy him.
Yet he has heard a voice in the wilderness--his own
voice— and in nature he finds corresponding images which
give impetus and form to that voice. In "Rosy quartz," for
example (the fifteenth poem of Most Difficult Area), lies
the symbol of the concentrated unity he seeks--a thing of
beauty created from destruction and chaos:
Out of what storm of darkness
out of what hellish blaze
out of what torments and what changes
held at last in a crystal matrix
held at last in its own wild form
held in its own unbroken aura
came this incandescent stone
came this immaculate glory
came this idea of the earth
to illuminate the frozen sky
This is no longer the infinite chaos of the "Crab Nebula,"
nor the annihilating calm of the "Mountain and Glacier
122
World,” but order within chaos— a living art and a trans
formed Dionysus, which is the ultimate goal the poet, or
the Ubermensch, can achieve.
The transformation achieved, the poet can now embrace
this "terrible and joyous world," wanting none other,
creating from out of his own earth-centered body and mind:
Now I have burned all my knowledge
and am learning to live in the whiteness naked
what I call art now is nothing made
but the pure pathology of my body and mind
A g
at the heart of a terrible and joyous world
— — ----------
Kenneth White, "Winter Letters from the Mountain,
2," The Bird Path, The Decal Review (Autumn, 1971), eight
eenth poem.
IV. EAST-WEST SYNTHESIS
Suppose you cut a tall bamboo
in two;
make the bottom piece a woman,
the headpiece a man;
rub them together
till they kindle:
tell me now,
the fire that's born,
is it male or female,
1
0 RSmanStha?
Kenneth White comments in the introduction to En toute
candeur (1964) that he feels an innate affinity with three
races: the Slavs, Celts and Chinese. One aspect of the
oriental element is clearly exemplified in White’ s tendency
toward syncretism— assimilating and combining apparently
contradictory forms— a trait of Eastern thought as well.
Thus, White can state with equanimity in "Letter to an Old
Calligrapher":
.... I have been influenced, or confirmed, by
Whitman, and Nietzsche (critique of present civi
lization, affirmation of life, will to self-reali
zation). Both of these, also, mean the end of a
certain Western culture and. as I see it, an
opening to the East .... 2
Devara DSsimayya, prayers to &iva, No. 144 from
Speaking of Siva, tr. with intro, by A.D. Ramanujan
(Baltimore: Penguin Books, Inc., 197 3), p. 110.
^Kenneth White, "Letter to an Old Calligrapher,"
unpublished essay (1968), p. 1.
124
One might initially feel that the chest-beating egoism of
Nietzschean philosophy (to cite only one example) could
find no harmony in the emphatic non-individualism of
Eastern thought. Yet, even as did the egoism of Whitman,
White finds a way. His method is not eclectic in the sense
of its adding disjointed and contradictory elements one on
top of the other; rather, in the adding, what is contra
dictory becomes somehow transformed into a continuous
whole, in the belief that the basic similarities are much
more profound than the superficial incongruities. Thus
our example of Nietzschean egoism becomes one of the minor
problems, dissolving of its own accord, once the deeper
bonds between East and West are established.
Even within the field of Eastern literature White
moves in the same way, synthesizing, for example, the
elaborate metaphysical rituals of Hinduism and its accom
panying denial of the senses, with the emphasis on the
immediate apprehension of reality of Zen Buddhism, the very
essence of which is sense experience. White himself sums
up his method best in the poem "Interpretations of a
Twisted Pine," which begins:
1.
I started off
by growing up
like everybody else
2.
Then I took
125
a bend to the south
an inclination east
a prolongation north
and a sharp turn west
3.
Now, approaching me
be prepared for grotesquerie
there are more than pines in my philosophy
He adds provocatively later in the same poem, in case we
haven't guessed, that "there is reason in my resin."
The deepest connections and the various phases in the
process of this East-West synthesis deserve extensive
study. Since the present essay is concerned with initiation
motifs, however, White's current movement East represents
a shift in his approach, and a going-beyond the limits of
most of what he has published up to the date of this study.
We shall only attempt to prepare the way for a more compre
hensive study devoted to interconnections East and West.
It appears that one of the points of contact, or
transition, between West and East is in the latter's
suggestion of concrete disciplines, or, as they are often
called in the East, various "ways of liberation," both
physical and metaphysical, which, outside the "metaphysical"
practices of poets writing in the seventeenth century,
remain practically unknown as such to Western culture.
These disciplines perhaps operate less rigidly for White
3
Kenneth White, "Interpretations of a Twisted Pine,"
The Bird Path, The Decal Review (Autumn, 1971), seventeenth
poem.
126
than for, let us say, a Krishna devotee, who seeks through
his prayers and rituals to unite with Krishna, and yet they
do serve an important purpose for White: they keep the
spiritual "antennae" functioning, keep the range of possi
bilities open, much as physical exercizes keep the body
alert, even when they are not done in preparation for a
specific event. They become psychic exercizes to preserve
and extend good health, to prepare one, perhaps, for the
"awakening."
The collection of White’s poems entitled The Bird Path
(to which "The Twisted Pine" belongs) reflects the deepest
permeation of Eastern thought thus far in White's work.
The title itself, bird path, suggests the idea of a "way of
liberation" which the poet travels into the non-egoism of
Eastern thought, as illustrated in this quote from the
preface to The Bird Path:
"To tread the bird path" is a Ch'an expression
which means forsaking all attachments to ego for
realizing the self-nature which is free from all
traces. A flying bird leaves no tracks in the air
like the self-nature which leaves no traces anywhere,
for it is omnipresent and is beyond location and
direction. Therefore "treading the bird path" is
Ch'an training, the object of which is to realize
the true face.1 *
Again, in a prose section within the fourth poem of Bird
Path, poem entitled "The Gannet Philosophy," White re-
-----j . --------------
as quoted by Kenneth White in the preface to The Bird
Path, from Lu K'uan Yii's Ch'an and Zen Teaching (London:
Rider and Company, 1961), p. 1^5.
127
interprets the phrase in terms of his own "white world":
When Nietzsche cries: "Let every body become
a dancer and every spirit a bird," he is calling
for white world culture. And when the Zen master
says: "The place of the spirit is nowhere, it's
like the tracks of birds in the sky," he is
referring to the white world, and of the way to
it, which is the bird path ....
The poems of this collection indicate, like the famous Zen
finger pointing to the moon, the various methods and
processes which White has used along the "bird path." The
moon itself, or the White World, which is White's equi
valent to the Zen moon, may indeed be inexpressible in
words. "There are ninety ways up the Pic d'Ossau," he
writes in the opening line of "Notes towards a Pyrenean
Tantra" (the twenty-first, and concluding, poem of Bird
Path), as if suggesting that the real and ultimate subject
can be surrounded, evoked, implied, and finally reached
in a multitude of ways. But, the poem seems to ask at the
end, can the ultimate be expressed, removed intact from its
utterly non-verbal habitat and translated into the medium
of words?
Met a mineralogist who told me of a big lump of rock
crystal he'd found incorporated into the rock, at an
almost inaccessible spot. He said he'd have to break
it into fragments before he could bring it down.
We have, then, in this collection of poems, the fragments
of the vision. To a reader not aware of or engaged in a
journey similar to that described in The Bird Path, the
poems probably remain baffling and inconclusive; to those
128
who are on such a journey, however, they might serve as the
invaluable guidelines and insights of one who has made the
journey and returned with precious treasures— and maps.
In a poem such as "Haiku of the Sud-Express" (the
third in the collection), fifteen haiku follow one another
in what at first seems an incongruous succession, until we
realize that the haiku are describing, or rather evoking,
in non-discursive language, a journey-within-a-journey— the
actual train trip, and, within it, the often poignant
flashes into the poet's own life. The first haiku casts a
reflective glance at the poet's life, making a direct,
unemphatic statement:
North-South, East-West
this man's identity
is difficult
The second haiku reflects a glimpse of what is perhaps an
outer (or inner) passing landscape where there is "snow in
the woods"; the third haiku juxtaposes the scene within
the train compartment with the poet's own thoughts, now
immersed in the natural landscape:
Watching the frost-world
while my two fellow travellers
talk about management
Then the poet begins flashing back to symbolic images in
his past, such as that of "the cup with the broken handle /
that became a howl" (.number four), followed immediately by
an image of his father as railroad switchman:
129
A railroad-cabin flashes by
I hear my father
whistling in the silence
(number six)
His mind suddenly flashes onto what is perhaps an image of
himself, an intoxicated "young dog in the snow," which is
"running around / in crazy circles" (number seven).
Then the mind finds an easy ecstasy in its mounting
reverie, as outer images coincide with inner:
Field after field
my eyes can't see
enough of this whiteness
Sun reflected
in ice over running water
this joyless joy
(numbers eleven and twelve)
An earlier complexity of outer and inner landscapes
resolves into unity and quiet simplicity:
Snow drifting
this man's identity
is very simple
(number thirteen)
The poem concludes when the poet reaches his destination—
when the journey itself concludes--appropriately, with the
beginnings of a new experience:
The door opens
She looks at me laughing:
you need a haircut. '
"White Beach Meditations" (the sixth poem in the
collection) suggests parallels with such ascetic practices
as those associated with Yoga, or "the way to mystic
130
control," where the intensity and severity of the effort
often reach the ultimate state of metaphysical intoxication
and union with the absolute. The ascetic "background" is
evoked in the first section:
A stretch of sand
and a scatter of rocks
garden of nothing
nakedness and nothingness
sun wind and silence
The promise that there is a definite goal to be reached is
depicted in the second section:
It is here on the edge
new life is conceived
on the difficult ground:
out of the breathing of the sea
and the emptiness of sands
the mind approaches the essential
and the body enters the dance
Although the ultimate union cannot be expressed, the
insights can be described:
The white world is possible
if the whiteness once gained
in a soul and a body
can radiate outwards
and penetrate inwards-—
as by cool white writing
as these waves on this sand
Cfifth section)
Asceticism, which represents the usual Hindu disci
pline, does not seem to be the only means of attaining the
131
white world. At the extreme limits of Hinduism, and
bordering on heresy to it, lies Tantrism, which, through
total immersion in sensual-sexual practices, can also open
the way to the highest states of spiritual awareness.
White explores such practice in "Valley of Birches" (the
eleventh poem), which, an epigraph to it from Lao-tse
suggests, is the "dark female," or the world of erotic
contemplation:
I must enter this birch-wood
and speak from within it
I must enter into
this lighted silence
(third section)
In what he calls a "prose periphery, like a bark," White
explains the sexual significance of the birch-tree imagery
for him:
Like any complete culture, the birch-culture
links sexuality . . . with the furthest reaches
of the mind and spirit.
(fifth section)
The birch-tree experience culminates, however, in another
poem, the twentieth in The Bird Path, entitled "Mahamfldra,"
meaning that state "when the mind finds no place to stop."
Taking its epigraph from the Tantrasara: "DSvi, may I
never forget / your navel's lonely pool," the poem,
addressed to the "D6vi," explores the erotic implications
of sexual knowledge. It opens by evoking a haunting
memory:
132
It then explore
of that memory:
The poet evokes
that memory:
Northwards again
'you come and go, you come and go'
red leaves along the waterways
quiet walking in the rain
feeling your body
growing out of the rain
then into the museum
my ten cents in the machine
the raga mingling with the rain
ah, now
your body in the dance
the red mark on your brow
, in a love song of nostalgia, the meaning
Out of India
'beautiful as a mare from Kashmir'
'eyes like silver fish'
long crowblack hair
firm dark round breasts
and the navel's lonely pool
all that I knew of India
all that I knew
centred in your body
surasundari
realising the wave
beyond the ambiguities of love
(section two)
the searches that had been leading up to
on the suspension bridge
at twilight
the blue sari
Csection four)
133
the search among books
the moments the flashes
the encounters
seeing in every girl prajna
the one aim: samarasa
achieved through aimlessness
(section three)
The erotic spirit joins its feminine counterpart as
sensual-intellectual knowledge coalesces in the sexual
experience:
'As soon as the conscience
is rid of its coverings
it stands out naked
and energy shows its essence'
the lotus and the lightning
'just as salt is dissolved in water
so the mind that takes its woman'
in the arms of the knowledge-girl
earth water fire wind
and space too--honour them
'so he comes into relation
with every kind of creature
and knows the path of freedom'
(section six)
Penetration into the "real” occurs as the poem culminates
in a whirling intoxication of consciousness:
Now the long-hidden real
within the names and forms
the moment when
twenty thousand breathings
reach their plenitude
'rain also is of the process'
and the music
and the dancing body
134
abhisambhodi
it all whirls incessantly
under the laws of change
but there is light in it
there is a rain of light
flooding the brain
’a pure flow of consciousness
a stream of colourless, emotion'
(section seven)
Yoga, Tantrism, Haiku— these are a few of the
directions the "twisted pine" has taken in the field of
Eastern literature; however, at this point, we must halt
our own part of the journey. We conclude this chapter
with a passage from "Poem to My coat," the eighth of The
Bird Path, which, still within the Eastern context, recapi
tulates many of the themes and motifs discussed throughout
the pages of this study. The poet, appropriately, is still
en route, from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particu
lar; he dialogues with his "shamanskin" coat as together
they encounter all their past selves, which are transformed
now beyond the self, to become parts of the natural
landscape:
. . . the wind comes to meet us
the cold wind of dawn
with a bible in one hand
a lump of quartz in the other
and a gull on his shoulder
135
greeting us like a brother
who's been away in foreign parts
more difficult areas
welcoming us in gaelic
(the three phrases he remembers)
and refreshing us
with a little rain distilled
by his sister the west
Walking along the shore
remembering the past
grasping it in several ways
the better to know it
and penetrate beyond appearances
into the secret nerve:
pelagian orgies
pushed to the limit!
(sections three and four)
I
136
CONCLUSION
In what is perhaps the most famous haiku in existence,
Basho wrote,
Old pond
Frog jump in—
Water sound
Seen from a rather whimsical angle, the Basho poem might
well summarize the process traced throughout this study:
the "old pond” could be the world into which the poet
enters (with apologies to Kenneth White for the metaphor),
and the "water sound," the "sound" of poetry, which, in
White's work, as in this haiku, signifies a continuing
process in the creative interaction of subjects, as well as
the wholly new subject— poetry— resulting from that
process. "Nothing special," the Zen sages call it— only
the ordinary, natural course of the journey into full,
creative being. It is just this journey into creativity
which we've been tracing, and judging from what we've seen,
1
the Zen masters down-played the difficulties involved.
That journey, however, as shown in the fourth chapter of
" T ”
Yet perhaps their "nothing special" is in fact a
shrewd technique, which aims more for those "lyrical
glances" Emerson writes of, which catch one by surprise
(after one prepares carefully for it), than for the "main
strength" associated with great enterprises; the Zen masteis
may have known well how the latter so often mangles what it
most desires.
137
this study, draws to a close as it passes from Western
into Eastern culture, leaving behind the initiatory motifs
which formed the theme of the first three.
In these first three chapters, if we may briefly
summarize their collective thrust, White first moves
through the thoroughfares of Western culture, "like every
body else," only to reject those routes in favor of a
cultural substratum, going out of the mainstream and into
the mysterious labyrinths of an "underground-otherground."
It is highly possible that he initially did not want to
undergo a split with his culture (for what poet does not
envy Homer, cradled at the bosom of his culture, writing
from its heart), but for the purposes of survival, of
maintaining that heilige Ndchternheit which Holderlin
believed was the only state worthy of poetry, there was
no other alternative to the "sterile country" of Celtic
symbolism, or the double vision (parallax) Emerson
deplored, or the "rabble" the Ubermensch must learn not to
pity; this dilemma of a homeless creative spirit leads to
what Erich Heller has described as "the hazard of modern
poetry”— a situation characterized by
... a world that has set up its own sober reality
on the far side of the poet's sobriety, and has
pushed the poet to a place where he, who is never
beside himself, is beside the world.2
Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (New York:
Meridian Books, 1959, 1967), p. 27^.
138
That this is in fact White's initial dilemma is borne out
in such writings as "On the Edge of the World" (note the
title) and The Most Difficult Area, to cite only two
examples, as well as in the metaphors for what he calls
reality, as opposed to the generally accepted definition of
it as "what's actually before your eyes"--"wintry"white,"
"empty," "naked," and, as he writes somewhere, "damned
cold."
Having no viable choice but to "undergo," he meets the
challenge bravely, even audaciously, and in the process,
comes up with some new perspectives and a few answers.
Unify, unify, unify! seems to be one of the answers
White urges on us, like an echo of Thoreau: Unify against
the fragmentation and disintegration of intellect, against
the threat of a divided mind and body, against the aliena
tion of man from Nature and from his nature. It is
possible, he says, that mind and body can interact in a
potent "sensual-intellectual" unity, that what we call
"evil" is not actually evil, but the necessary complement
to what we call "good" (and need not result in a hostile
breach in our psychic natures), that what we call "reality"
can also imply spiritual realities--not as sophisticated
"supreme fictions," but as realities. Reality, he insists,
must have a few windmills in it, not as an indulgence, but
as a belief, in order to be real, and in order to make life
139
the joyous experience it could be. It is only when this
happens that the mind can unify and accord itself with the
myths that lend coherence to its reality--the myth, for
example, of the unified "white world."
These insights are perhaps White's reward and compen
sation for the harrowing trials of initiation. They are
also his bedrock and his touchstones as he moves Eastward,
and it is doubtful that he will soon abandon them without
3
reason.
The journey East, however, following as it does the
initiation process, is undertaken for enrichment, not
survival. And that seems to be what Kenneth White is now
after--a gathering and enrichment of forces. Recently, he
has worked in great depth on other Western writers
(including W.C. Williams, Hart Crane, Gary Snyder, Robinson
Jeffers and D.H. Lawrence), studying and absorbing their
thought in detail, in order to add to and enlarge his own.
Summing it up more succintly himself, White writes in a
letter of 1971:
3
In our literary terminology, White would probably be
called a Romantic, in that he is and remains a spiritual
seeker; yet there is in his writing a resilience born of
toughness, an equilibrium and control of expression far
more characteristic of Classical than Romantic writers. In
fact, one of the reasons why Romantic writers often become
so strident and self^destructiye is perhaps because our
culture, outside its religions, provides them with so
pathetically few of the spiritual and imaginative
reservoirs they need to survive creatively. White has gone
East for this, if only temporarily; if Basho and Han Shan
can be called Romantics, well then, perhaps so is White.
140
Feel I’ve got the hard core of the thing pretty well
shall we say crystallized--after a lot of shakings
and mixings and solutions! Now want to circumference
more and more.
(unpublished letter of
March 15, 1971)
This image of circumferences characterizes the latest
direction of White's work; it also calls back to mind the
Basho poem we began with, which yields a concluding meta
phorical parallel to White's work: we might now say that
when the initiation (the "water sound") has stopped, it is
followed by rows and rows of ripples, circumferencing and
radiating out of each other to the very limits of the pond,
whatever— as time will show us--its size may be:
the whole I seek
is centre plus circumference
and now the struggle at the centre is over
the circumference
i t
beckons from everywhere
Kenneth White, "XXX," A Walk Along the Shore (unpub
lished) .
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. Celtic Surrealism
Audoin, Philippe. Breton. Paris: Gallimard, 1970.
Breton, Andre. Arcane 17. Paris: Union G6n6rale
d’Editions, 1&65.
_______ . Poemes. Paris: Gallimard, 1948.
Crastre, Victor. Le drame du surrealisme. Paris: Les
Editions du Temps, 1963.
Markale, Jean. Les Celtes. Paris: Payot, 1969.
_______ , ed. and tr. Les Grands Bardes Gallois, with an
Introductory Essay by Andr§ Breton, "Braise au trepied
de Keridwen." Paris: Falaize, 1956.
Marx, Jean, Les litteratures celtiques. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1^6^.
Nadeau, Maurice. Histoire du Surrealisme et Documents
Surrealistes. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964.
Press, John. "Ted Walker, Seamus Heany, and Kenneth White:
Three New Poets," The Southern Review (July 1969), pp.
673-688.
Wittig, Kurt. The Scottish Tradition in Literature.
Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 195 8.
II. The Transcendental Scot
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Works. Edited by
Edward Waldo Emerson. New Vork: tTTlliam H. Wise and
Co. , 1923.
. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820-1872.
Edited by Edward Waldo Emerson. New rork: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1936-38.
Heller, Erich. The Artist’s Journey Into the Interior.
New York: Random House, 19&9, 1965.
142
Miller, Perry, ed. The American Transcendentalists.
New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., T5T71
Paul, Sherman. Emerson's Angle of Vision. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1952^
Spiller, Robert E. "Literary Fulfillment," Literary His
tory of the United States. Ed. Robert IT! Spiller
et. al: New York: The MacMillan Co., 1953, 1960.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Ed. Emory Holloway.
New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1926.
III. Dionysian Man
Hamburger, Michael. T^.e Truth of Poetry. New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970.
Kaufm ann, W a lte r. N ie tz s c h e : P h ilo s o p h e r , P s y c h o lo g is t.
A n t i c h r i s t . New Y o rk : M e rid ia n B o o ks, 19$0, 1963.
Mann, Thomas. "Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of
Contemporary Events," Nietzsche: A Collection of
Critical Essays. Ed. Robert C. Solomon. New York:
Anchor Books, 1973.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Werke in drei BMnden. Ed. Karl
Schlechta. Munich:- Carl Hanser, 1954-5 6.
143
BIBLIOGRAPHY: KENNETH WHITE
(Chronological Order)
Wild Coal. Paris: Club des Etudiants d'Anglais, 1963.
"The Real Climate." Cleft /Edinburgh, Scotland7, 1963.
En toute candeur. Tr. Pierre Leyris. Paris: Mercure de
Prance, 1964.
"Affinit£s Electives." Unpublished essay in French, 1964.
"Ten Thousand Yellow Buds." Cleft (May, 1964).
"A la lisiere du monde" Mt the Edge of the World/. Tr.
Michel Gresset. Les Lettres Nouvelles (janvier-
fevrier, 1965), pp^ 5-15. ~
"Dix milles bourgeons jaunes” /Ten Thousand Yellow Buds7.
Tr. Michel Gresset. La Breche: action surrealiste
(1965).
Letters from Gourgounel. London: Jonathan Cape, 1966.
The Cold Wind of Dawn. London: Jonathan Cape, 1966.
"On the Moor in January" and "Eros Gull." Kolokon
/Durham, England7, (Spring, 1966).
"In the Golden Light Again" and "This also will pass."
Kolokon (Summer, 1966).
"Autobiography." Unpublished essay, 1968.
"Dylan Thomas." Feuillage /Pau, France7, (janvier, 1968).
"Letter to an Old Calligrapher." Unpublished essay, 1968.
The Most Difficult Area. London: Cape Goliard, 1968.
Andre Breton: Selected Poems. Translations. London:
Jonathan Cape, 1&69..
144
Ode to Charles Fourier. Translation of the Breton poem
_ with “introductory essay on Fourierism and Surrealism
by White. London: Cape Goliard Press, 1969.
"Poesie et Revolution" and "The Phenomenon of May."
Feuillage (mars, 1969), pp. 1-22.
"Towards a 'Creative University1." Feuillage (mai, 1969).
"British Poetry, 1950-1969." Tr. Hansten Berge. Raster
/"Amsterdam/, (Winter, 1969).
"Rendezvous with Rene Daumal." Unpublished essay, 1969.
Cosmos. Pau: Imprimerie de la Monnaie, 1970.
"Special Kenneth White." Feuillage (fevrier, 1970).
"Les limbes incandescentes" /Incandescent Limbo/ and
"Le chaudron de Cuchulainn" /The Rocky Road to
Carraroe/. Tr. Robert Andre and Kenneth White.
Commerce /Paris/, (printemps, 6t£, 1970), pp. 23-5*+.
"Les portes bleues de janvier" /The Blue Doors of January/.
Tr. Michel Gresset. Les Lettres Nouvelles (mai-juin,
1970), pp. 57-70. ' ‘
"The Region of Identity" and "Cape Breton Elegy." Raster
(Summer, 1970).
"Open Letter to All Hyperboreans." Raster (Autumn, 1970).
"Voyage dans la derive de l'aube" /Travels in the Drifting
Dawn/. Tr. Pierre Leyris. La Traverse 3 (avril,
1970).
"Poetry and the Tribe, I" /essay on Gary Snyder7. Raster
(Spring, 1971), pp. 18-36.
"Poetry and the Tribe, II" /essay on Gary Snyder/. Raster
(Autumn, 1971), pp. 415-428.
The Bird Path. The Decal Review /Cardiff, Wales/, (Autumn,
1971).
"Journal d'un Hyperboreen" /The Hyperborean in Paris/.
Tr. Dominique Aury. Npuvelle R&yue Francaise
(d^cembre, 1971), pp. ”
"Into the White World." Raster (Spring, 1972).
145
"La Baraque au Bout du Monde” /The Shack at the Edge of
the World7. Tr. Alain Delahaye. Commerce (printemps,
1972).
"Travels in the Drifting Dawn.” The Decal Review (Autumn,
1972).
"Lettre d* Amsterdam” /Letter from Amsterdam?. Tr.
Michelle Tran van Khai. Lettres Nouvelles (hiver,
1972), pp. 98-107.
"Underground London,” "Essays and Experiments," and "Into
the White World." The Feathered Egg /Paris:
Institut d1Anglais, Charles Vy, No7 1: "Underground-
Otherground" (April, 1972), pp. 1-33.
"A Note on Methodology," "A few Gull Cries in the Void,"
and "Towards a Creative University." The Feathered
Egg, No. 2: "University and Creativity1 1 (January
1573), pp. 21-22, 27-29, 33-44.
"Cape Breton Elegy.” Ishmael/Madrid?, (Winter-Spring,
1972-73).
A Walk Along The Shore, extracts. Raster (Winter, 1972-
— 73)7 PP* 5 06-518.
A Walk Along the Shore, extracts. Akros /Scotland?,
(December, 1973).
Four essays in French /on D.H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas,
Poetry of the War, 1914-18, New Tendencies in Poetry7.
Literature de Notre Temps: Ecrivains Anglais et
Irlandais, fcecueil belgium: Casterman, 1973.
"La Vallee des Bouleaux" /Valley of BirchesJ. Tr. Marie-
Claude White. Commerce (printemps, 1973).
"J.C. Powys: une technique de vie" /The Life-Technique of
J.C. Powys?. Tr. Michelle Tran van Khai. Granit
/Paris?, (automne-hiver, 1973).
"De l'herbe dans les rues d'Anvers" /Brass in the Streets
of Anvers7 and "Nuit « l Barcelone" /Night in Barcelona
Tr. Michelle Iran yan Khai and Marie-Claude White.
Commerce (printemps, 1974).
Preface to French translation of Ezra Pound’s guide to
Kulchur. Tr. Philippe Jaworski and Kenneth White.
Paris: Editions de l'heure, 1974.
146
The Tribal Pharma. Wales: Unicorn Bookshop, 197*+.
l*+7
CURRICULUM VITAE: KENNETH WHITE
1936
1939
1941
1948
1951
1954
1956
1957
1959
1961
1962
1963
1964
Born 28 April, Glasgow, Scotland.
Moved to Fairlie, village on the West Coast of
Scotland.
48 At local primary school.
Dux of school. Medal. Special prize for
"outstanding ability and proficiency."
51 Junior secondary school (at Largs, town three
miles up the coast from Fairlie).
Dux of school. Gold Medal.
54 Ardrossan Academy.
Dux of school. Medals.
56 University of Glasgow. Studies in Modern
Languages (French, German), with, as subsidiary
subjects, Latin and Philosophy.
57 On D.A.A.D. (Deutschen Akademischen Austansch-
dienst) scholarship at University of Munich.-
59 Honors years at Glasgow University. M.A.
Hons. 1st class in French and German.
First prize and medal in both French and
German. Nominated first student in the Faculty
of Arts. Awarded scholarship for two years
post-graduate study in Paris.
61 In Paris, working at thesis on poetry of Paul
Eluard. Studies mainly in Surrealism.
62 In Paris. Awarded scholarship by British
Institute.
63 In Paris. Lecteur d1anglais at Sorbonne.
Wild Coal.
64 Invited to Glasgow to be assistant lecturer
in French.
Publication of En toute candeur. Articles.
148
1964
1965
1966
1966
1967
1967
1969
1970
1972
1973
65 In Glasgow, lecturing at university.
Begin lecture-and-discussion group (Jargon
Group), publishing roneotyped papers, later
relayed from London.
66 Promoted to full lecturer.
Publication of The Cold Wind of Dawn and
Letters from Gourgounel.
67 Lecturer in Glasgow.
Taping of segments from The Cold Wind of Dawn
(The British Council, "Contemporary £oets
Reading their Own Poetry" series). Recorded
in London, June 27, 1967. Tape No. 1320.
68 Lecteur d * anglais at the College litteraire
unxversitaire m Pau, Basses-lt’ yrfenSes.
Publication of Breton translations.
Lecteur at Sorbonne (Charles V, Institut
d *Anglais).
74 Publication of numerous articles, prose and
poetry in Raster, Lettres Nouvelles, Nouvelle
Revue Francaise, Commerce, Decal Review,
Granit, ana Akros.
Public lectures on work of French and American
poets, sponsored by British Institute, Paris.
Taping of series from Gourgounel (now being
translated into Germani for Eb’ 6 (Radio Scotland)
in April-June. Composition of additional
Gourgounel chapters for German translation.
Promoted to Maltre de conferences at Charles V
in Paris. Classes in American poetry
(including series on "The Whitman Line") and
seminar class, "East-West Synthesis."
1974
Taping of segments from A Walk Along the Shore
for BBC (Radxo Scotland), March first.

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Creator Novak, Lynn Taylor (author)

Core Title Through To The White: Initiation And Creation In The Poetry Of Kenneth White

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Malone, David H. (committee chair), Clothier, Peter J. (committee member), Frey, John R. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-749019

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