17 pages • 34 minutes read
Galway KinnellBlackberry Eating
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Galway Kinnell is considered a Deep Image poet. This movement in mid-century American poetry focused on spiritual intensity and transcendence of the self instead of confessionalism. The style of Deep Image poetry that Kinnell works in is based on concrete images and the resonance that both the speaker and the reader have with the experience of these images. This experience generates the meaning of the poem. For example, he uses a common experience like picking blackberries to conjure a metaphorical image of tasting the words that form a poem.
Older Deep Image poems tend to be highly stylized, but Kinnell takes a looser, more colloquial approach in “Blackberry Eating” by playing with a strict poetic form. He also focuses on the sound and feel of the words used.
Deep Image poetry is heavily influenced by two movements. It is inspired by the French Symbolist theory of “correspondences,” or a connection between the physical and spiritual realms, made popular by Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. Deep Imagists also find influence from the Surrealism in more recent 20th-century poetry by Hispanic poets like Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda.
Other American poets who worked in the Deep Image style include: Robert Bly, James Wright, and David Ignataw.
Historical Context
Kinnell’s young adult years were shaped by the first major wave of the Cold War in the 1950s and early 1960s. Because he traveled broadly during this time, he dodged the strict conformity and societal repression present in postwar America. Spending much of his time in France and the Middle East, he was privileged to see the world differently than his compatriots and explore his vision through poetry.
Kinnell returned to the United States at the start of the tumultuous 1960s and swiftly channeled his efforts into activism. He worked for racial justice in Louisiana, when the South was still deeply segregated. His early work explores his experiences registering people to vote and desegregating employment in the state.
As a military veteran and poet, he leant his voice and talents to the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War. He joined with other writers in 1968 to sign the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” and based his book The Book of Nightmares on these experiences.
When “Blackberry Eating” was published in 1980, Kinnell had moved on from both movements. The war was over, and the mid-century Civil Rights movement dissipated following the Civil Rights Act of 1968. In the 1970s, Kinnell focused primarily on his teaching career and family. The meditative poems in Mortal Acts, Mortal Words reflect a man in the early autumn of his life during a brief lull in world events: before the resurgence of the Cold War and troubles in the Middle East.
