The Archetypal Field of Poetry

Published in 2022

Published in 2022, Ekstasis Edition, Victoria, BC, Canada

C.G. Jung made archetypes one of the central concepts to his approach to psychology, and this has been elaborated upon and expanded on by some of his followers, for instance James Hillman. An archetype is a psychological concept, it is a blue print, a prototype, an image, or a pattern of behavioural experience. It is also a term, used popularly today, suggesting that the experience of mythological characters is a pattern that can be seen in the behaviour of average people (as explored in Jean Shinoda Bolen’s books). Another contemporary Jungian thinker who has been influenced by the concept of archetypes is Michael Conforti, a Jungian analyst and author of Field, Form, and Fate: Patterns in Mind, Nature, and Psyche (Spring Publications, Woodstock, 1999).

In poetry an archetype, as an image, or as a narrative, gives depth and sophistication to a poem letting it work on several levels of meaning simultaneously. Maud Bodkin, in Archetypal Patterns In Poetry, Psychological Studies Of Imagination (Vintage Books, New York, 1958) examines C.G. Jung’s “hypothesis in regard to the psychological significance of poetry.” She writes,

The special emotional significance possessed by certain poems—a significance going beyond any definite meaning conveyed—he attributes to the stirring in the reader’s mind, within or beneath his conscious response, of unconscious forces which he terms “primordial images,” or archetypes. These archetypes he describes as “psychic residua of numberless experiences of the same types,” experiences which have happened not to the individual but to his ancestors, and of which the results are inherited in the structure of the brain, a priori determinants of individual experience.

An archetype can include psychological complexes—it is a way to analyze and find patterns in any behaviour. Conforti extends the concept of archetypes to posit, if I understand him correctly, an external existence to the archetypes independent of the psyche, or of psychology. Archetypes, for Conforti, are not only psychological constructs, they also have an empirical existence, such as the pattern iron filings on a piece of glass will make when a magnet is placed under the glass. The division between the inner, psychological and spiritual domain, and the outer domain of consensual and empirical reality, is blurred, even eliminated. Conforti’s concept of archetypes seems to be both outside of time and space, and also firmly located in their expression inside the temporal and spatial. It is a fascinating and, some might say, a mystical idea, one that will be rejected by some (or many) clinical psychologists.

While hearing Conforti speak, to the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal last fall (2008), I realized that his concept of archetypes is one of the clues I had been looking for regarding how poetry is composed. It occurred to me that there is an archetypal field of poetry, which does not mean that poems have already been written and poets merely record what they “hear,” although this is what some poets describe as their experience when writing or composing poems. I suggest (and it’s just a thought) that there is an archetypal field of poetry, a psychological state accessed by poets when writing poems. Writing poems is a [“kind-of”] shamanic journey or process in which images (which can also be archetypal) are retrieved and expressed in composition. This should not conflict with the popular division of poets into romantic (or spontaneous) and classical (or formal).

It is very difficult for us to conceive such a thing, but the reality—not just the idea—of the static ego, formed and unchanging, might one day be replaced with a different concept: of a perceiving entity in the active present moment, a constellation of selves with an identifiable Persona, moving in and out of time and space, and possibly existing in the “undifferentiated unity of existence” (W.T. Stace, The Teaching Of The Mystics, Selections From The Great Mystics And Mystical Writings Of The World, A Mentor Book, New York, 1960). We may, one day, conceive of a poem as an existing entity that both exists and doesn’t exist before it is written, and that it comes to us uninvited to be transcribed by the poet. Just as J. Krishnamurti described, during his lectures—including lectures that I attended in Saanen, New York City, and Ojai—that an apparently living entity came to him—not as an invention of his psyche—but as, for instance, a living presence that had a quality of goodness or love that exists outside of his individual consciousness, an entity perceivable at times by him, as existing in the world by itself. There is no “how” as in “how does one access this experience?” There is only the work of creating a foundation for the work to come if it does come or if it is to come.

So, if asked where my poems come from, I would answer that they are from the archetypal field of poetry.