Guy Davenport on Ronald Johnson’s Transcendentalist Poetry

“The green gold is the living quality which the alchemists saw not only in man but also in inorganic nature. It is an expression of the life spirit, the anima mundi or filius macrocosmi , the Anthropos who animates the whole cosmos. This spirit has poured himself into everything, even into inorganic matter; he is present in metal and stone.” –Carl Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections * The philosopher Wittgenstein, from whose formidable talents came a house, a sewing machine, and an airplane propeller as well as the books for which he is honored, said toward the end of his anguished life that he had always wanted to write a poem but could never think of a poem to write. Nor did Heraclitus write a poem, doubtless for the same reason. Nor Leonardo, that we know of. The miracle by which we have two poems from R. Buckminster Fuller, the Pythagoras de nos jours , rises from the transparent fact that Mr. Fuller’s Dymaxion prose has twice defied mortal comprehension and has twice been found to be readable when distributed on the page as poetry is, phrase by phrase, or “ventilated,” the texts in each instance being word for word the same. These austere extremes of the poetic imagination are useful if difficult evocations, for Ronald Johnson’s transmutation of the English poem reaches down to the very roots of poetry itself. If a poem has ever occurred to Mr. Johnson, he has never written it. At least he has never published it. A poem as it is generally understood is a metrical composition either lyric, dramatic, or pensive made by a poet whose spiritual dominion flows through his words like the wind through leaves or the lark’s song through twilight. In the fourth part of “When Men Will Lie Down as Gracefully & as Ripe—,” Mr. Johnson performs for a passage of Emerson’s what Buckminster Fuller did for his own prose. He spaces it out and makes a poem of it, though this bald-faced act scarcely answers to the received notion of how a poem is written. It is not […]

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