9 - Lyric as meditation

Summary

One of the striking features of American lyric poetry during the last half of the twentieth century is the predominance of lyrics written in what can be called the “meditative” mode. I am using the term “meditative” in its most general sense, to indicate a state of prolonged or concentrated contemplation in which the poet engages with ideas, objects in the natural world, the self, or some combination of these. The meditative mode of lyric is certainly not a new one: meditative poetry has a long history that includes the visionary strain of the Romantics as well as Emersonian and Whitmanic transcendentalism, Yeatsian mysticism, Stevensian philosophical meditation, and the Surrealism of European and South American poets such as Georg Trakl, Federico García Lorca, César Vallejo, and Pablo Neruda.

The turn toward meditative modes of poetry in the 1950s and 1960s is attributable to several factors: the increasing visibility of paradigms of the subconscious or unconscious adopted from Freudian and Jungian psychology; the growing acceptance of Surrealism in art and literature; and the experimentation with ideas taken from occult and mystical traditions. Finally, there was a broadly based shift from a Depression-era poetry more concerned with immediate social conditions to a postwar poetry more concerned with an exploration of the (lyric) self and its place in the world. This exploration, which took a variety of different forms, explains the increasingly symbolic, introspective, and metaphysical character of much postwar writing.