To Create the Self

Abstract

From this I shall evolve a man,' Wallace Stevens wrote of the mind's efforts to integrate the self by controlling a swarm of external phenomena. And in our time there are poets whose work is built on the awareness of disorder, confusion, and change, and for whom those very conditions generate the discovery of an interior life through powers above the level of reason. That self-discovery is attained by revelation that is not ultimate, as is the mystic's or the saint's; it is, however, genuine, in that the poet has broken through the limitations of conventional vision to see and to proclaim the truth of what has been seen. The poetry of Arthur Gregor, John Ashbery, and Jean Garrigue is, each in its own way, based on genuine vision and on revelation through clouds of distress and exile. Each has developed a method of meditation through which the soul may strive toward unity of being. Central to the work of each poet is a vision of the integrated self, as well as the unification of all people and the union of people and things. Each poet dramatizes the belief in the power of art to reveal a continuous present and to cut through the limiting divisions of days, hours, and years. Those notions are related to Plato's idea that the oneness of abso-