One of the first lines in Galway Kinnell’s Essay, “Poetry, Personality, and Death”, stated that, “The poetry of this century is marked by extreme self-absorption” (Kinnell, 219). He was alluding to the popular occurrence of overly confident poets of our time that write about their current situation and become so consumed with their own personal perspective that they fail to see the bigger picture. Therefore they miss the concept of writing transcendent work in which others can then have the ability project their own experiences upon in order elicit emotion of some sort. He does, however, lend exception to a few poets that seem to have figured out how to take themselves out of the picture in order to produce pure works in way of intentions.
…show more content…
The first time I heard this read aloud, I don’t think anyone in the room could admit that it didn’t elicit some emotion effect on them. It is about a father desperately attempting to save his daughter, even though he knows that she will die eventually. It has a beautiful play on the tragic but curious thought of whether he or his daughter would die first. His entire life revolved around his daughter to the point that she was all he could write about. Kinnell quotes Gary Snyder saying, “Widely speaking, the muse is anything other that touches you and moves you. Be it a mountain range, a band of people, the morning star, or a diesel generator. Breaks through the ego-barrier. But this touching-deep is as a mirror, and man in his sexual nature has found the clearest mirror to be his human lover” (233). While we know that his daughter was not his lover, it was very evident that she was not only precious to him, but also the only person of true importance in his life. Something beautiful that both this essay and the poem “Pittsburg” touch on is the idea of fate. Kinnell states, “I suppose nothing is stronger than fate – if fate is that amount of vital energy allotted each of us – but if anything were stronger, it would not be acquiescence, the coming to want only what one already has, it would be desire, desire which rises from the roots of one’s life and transfigures it” (236). We all desire to create works in which transcend time and culture, but in order to do so, we must put the person that we find most important out of the picture completely,
The first time I heard this read aloud, I don’t think anyone in the room could admit that it didn’t elicit some emotion effect on them. It is about a father desperately attempting to save his daughter, even though he knows that she will die eventually. It has a beautiful play on the tragic but curious thought of whether he or his daughter would die first. His entire life revolved around his daughter to the point that she was all he could write about. Kinnell quotes Gary Snyder saying, “Widely speaking, the muse is anything other that touches you and moves you. Be it a mountain range, a band of people, the morning star, or a diesel generator. Breaks through the ego-barrier. But this touching-deep is as a mirror, and man in his sexual nature has found the clearest mirror to be his human lover” (233). While we know that his daughter was not his lover, it was very evident that she was not only precious to him, but also the only person of true importance in his life. Something beautiful that both this essay and the poem “Pittsburg” touch on is the idea of fate. Kinnell states, “I suppose nothing is stronger than fate – if fate is that amount of vital energy allotted each of us – but if anything were stronger, it would not be acquiescence, the coming to want only what one already has, it would be desire, desire which rises from the roots of one’s life and transfigures it” (236). We all desire to create works in which transcend time and culture, but in order to do so, we must put the person that we find most important out of the picture completely,