SOURCE: Young, Gloria L. “‘The Fountainhead of All Forms’: Poetry and the Unconscious in Emerson and Howard Nemerov.” In Artful Thunder: Versions of the Romantic Tradition in Honor of Howard P. Vincent, edited by Robert J. DeMott and Sanford E. Marovitz, pp. 241-67. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1975.

In the following essay, Young outlines the ways in which Nemerov's poetry was prefigured by both Ralph Waldo Emerson's and Carl Jung's ideas of the unconscious.

For it is the inert effort of each thought … to solidify and hem in the life. … But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses it already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable expansions.¹

It is a commonplace of contemporary poetry, as Northrop Frye has pointed out, that “the natural metaphorical direction of the inside world is downward, into the profounder depths of consciousness...