| In an effort to discover the pattern, if any, behind Robert Bly's and W. S. Merwin's shift to deep-image poetry in the early 1960s, the dissertation's first chapter defines the nature of that shift, drawing on the writings of Bly, Merwin, and James Wright, and reaching the initial conclusion that the poets' respective adoption of open forms and surreal imagery involves the deliberate arousal of the unconscious, accompanied by a sharp sense of rationality's shortcomings. This effort is labeled the intuitive project and traced briefly through modern poetrics, philosophy, and sociology, becoming part of a larger, cultural phenomenon. Before turning to Bly's and Merwin's respective versions of it, finally, both possible outcomes of the intuitive project--either positive, involving a coming-to-terms with the aroused unconscious, or negative, involving a failure to do so--are outlined in the imagery of Edgar Allan Poe.;For Merwin, on the other hand, the project's result is positive. Also beginning with a biography, the third chapter analyzes Merwin's writings, arguing that he moves from an initially negative sense of the unconscious to an acceptance of it, visible largely as a coming-to-terms with death.;The fourth chapter draws on this motif, as well as on the work of Aldous Huxley and others on altered states, in order to "formulate" the completed pattern of contact with the unconscious, applying it briefly to James Wright's "Two Hangovers" to demonstrate its usefulness, and calling, finally, for the greater application of research on altered states toward our understanding of poetry.;Following a brief biography, Bly's writings are analyzed chronologically in the second chapter, in order to argue that, rather than coming-to-terms with the aroused unconscious, Bly projects his sense of it out into the world around him. This projection then becomes the pursuit of conceptual grounds that will justify his findings of this separate "consciousness." The chapter's last section analyzes Bly's latest collection of poetry, concluding that the net result of the project for him has been negative. |
