Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice

Abstract

Precipitations traces influence of occult on contemporary American poetry and positions it within larger tradition of Romanticism. Devin Johnston focuses on works of H.D., Robert Duncan and James Merrill, as well as Susan Howe and Nathaniel Mackey, to show how occult, in its resistance to dialectical thinking, proved attractive to these poets and offered a means by which traditional notions of authorship could be challenged. Johnston argues that for these writers, the poem is not produced by individual mind, but precipitates out of a complex network of shared circumstances. Yeats and Blake have central roles in this study, but whereas Yeats has long been associated with occultism as a literary phenomenon, Johnston argues that Blake s Romantic organicism has offered a more compelling model for American poets in latter half of twentieth century. With close attention to ways in which recent American poetry has been written and read, Precipitations examines composition of particular poems within context of broad debates concerning form, indeterminacy and authorship.

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