Archetypal Patterns in Poetry
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Reviews
In Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, Bodkin tried, as Boswell (1936: 553) quotes, “to bring psychological analysis and reflection to bear upon the imaginative experience communicated by great poetry, and to examine those forms or patterns in which the universal forces of our nature there find objectification.” Among the forms or archetypal patterns Bodkin presented, according to Boswell, may be included: the “Oedipus complex,” the “rebirth archetype,” the “archetype of Heaven and Hell,” and “images of the Devil, the Hero, and God” (Boswell 1936: 553). Boswell goes on to write that Bodkin’s “analyses and presentation are excellent; but the explanations, where any are attempted, seem inadequate to account for some very significant facts which the analyses have brought out” (Boswell 1936: 553).
On the other hand, Willcock (1936: 92) states that “the final impression left by Bodkin’s book is one of unusual sensitiveness in reading and sincerity in recording experience.” In addition, “Bodkin’s pursuit of primordial symbols serves her determination to show, at least from one angle of approach, what poetry is and how it works. She holds herself back from slipping down the easy slope of paraphrase and prose meanings; neither does she drift into allegories and typifiyings” (Willcock 1936: 91).
Finally, Hooke (1935: 176) called Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, “a distinguished book; distinguished by acute reasoning, wide and deep learning, and a fine sensitiveness to poetic values. It is a courageous and, to a great extent, successful attempt to apply the technique of analytical psychology to the cloudy and elusive emotional patterns brought up into consciousness by the magic of great poetry.”
The texts Bodkin discusses in Archetypal Patterns in Poetry include those of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Coleridge (Hooke 1935: 176; Boswell 1936: 553; Willcock 1936: 91); Goethe and Euripides (Boswell 1936: 553); and Aeschylus, Shelley, T. S. Eliot, as well as the Christian Gospels (Hooke 1935: 177).
Discussion
At work in the poems of Milton and Aeschylus, for example, as well as in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, is a father-like figure that Bodkin identifies as the Divine Despot (Bodkin 1934: 250; cited in Allgaier 1973: 1036).
The Divine Despot seems to be involved in the Heaven-and-Hell archetype, the kernel of which contains a "vital aspect" that is both positive and negative, and appears in space "as an image of loveliness with an ever attendant threatening shadow, a desolation beneath or around it" (Bodkin 1934: 122; cited in Shmiefsky 1967: 721).
Heaven, Hell, and the Divine Despot may descend to earth and have offspring in the Hamlet theme which involves a child's "ambivalent attitude" toward its parents and off of which are spun such variants as Oedipus and Orestes (Bodkin 1934: 11-15, cited in Williams 1973: 221), or all may remain at the divine level, as in the situation with Milton's God and Satan, or Aeschylus's Zeus and Prometheus:
"The antagonism between Prometheus and Zeus can partly be traced to a very general psychological tension, between the instinct of self-expression and rebellion against group values, and the opposite instinct to sustain those group values, and to merge personal claims in a greater power. Bodkin shows how Milton's Satan represents both these psychological forces at different times. Sometimes he is the heroic antagonist of tyranny, and sometimes a devilish enemy of group values, conceived to reside in the protection of God. In the mind of the reader there are these forces, sometimes inherited from very ancient times, and they may determine his response to the poetry quite independently of his conscious thinking about God, fate, and morality. As in the mind of poet or percipient the character of Satan alternates, so inversely the character of God must alternate too. In the Prometheus of Aeschylus are remembered dim fears that progress is wrong, inimical to the group; but also there are present instincts of self-assertion and rebellion. These instincts are connected with the infantile wishes and fears which still lurk in our minds. A poet may 'recall an infantile type of religious fear,' suggesting 'the Freudian doctrine of the father complex or imago, in relation to God.' 'The Freudian school of psychologists has asserted that the religious life represents a dramatisation on the cosmic plane of emotions which arose in the child's relation to his parents' " (Knight 1938: 53-54; citing Bodkin 1934: 191, 232 ff., 239, 242).
Complicating matters is the Rebirth archetype which, like the Heaven-and-Hell archetype, also involves a "vital aspect" that is simultaneously positive and negative, but which appears, not static, but rather "as a passage in time, from life to desolate death and beyond, to life renewed" (Bodkin 1934: 122; cited in Shmiefsky 1967: 721). In addition, there is a "night-journey stage within the pattern of Rebirth" (Bodkin 1934: 136; cited in Shmiefsky 1967: 735).
Rebirth is
“a movement, downward, or inward toward the earth’s centre, or a cessation of movement—a physical change which … appears also as a transition toward severed relation with the outer world, and, it may be, toward disintegration and death. This element in the pattern is balanced by a movement upward and outward—an expansion or outburst of activity, a transition toward redintegration and life-renewal” (Bodkin 1934: 54; cited in Morgan 1971: 42).
Rebirth starts with frustration and has as its goal transcendence; between these two extends the “process of growth, or ‘creative evolution,’ in the course of which the constituent factors are transformed” (Bodkin 1934: 72; cited in Morgan 1971: 42).
Heaven, Hell, and Rebirth are related: "Heaven is mainly a garden in spring, Hell the scape of winter or a desert, and Rebirth an April violet" (Shmiefsky 1967: 721). Milton's Paradise Lost is an example of this interrelation of the two archetypes, where Bodkin claims that "it is as though the poet's feeling divined the relation of the concepts of Heaven and Hell to the images of spring's beauty and of the darkness under the earth whence beauty comes forth and to which it returns" (Bodkin 1963: 97; cited in Shmiefsky 1967: 735). Further interpatterning of the two archetypes, spatially and temporally, occurs when Satan emerges "upwards from his tremendous cavern below the realm of Chaos, to waylay the flower-like Eve in her walled Paradise and make her an inmate of his Hell, even as Pluto rose from beneath the earth to carry off Proserpine from her flowery meadow" (Bodkin 1934: 97-98; cited in Rosenman 1978: 12)
Above everything, the Star image "shines clear, for a moment between the opposites, between man and woman, between day and night; [it] fades and returns like the bloom of a flower, as the world's rhythms sweep on" (Bodkin 1934: 296; cited in Shmiefsky 1967: 725).
