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Volume 1 Issue 7

December 2014

Relying on Donations from the Unconscious: A Critical Study of Mark Strand’s Poetry
Dr. Md Equebal Hussain, 
Associate Professor & Head, 
Department of English, 
M.S. College, 
Motihari, , 
Abstract
The fundamental world of poetry in Mark Strand, a major voice of our time is the inward world. In this sense he comes closest to the Subjective School of American poetry and the poetry of Deep Imagism which explicitly stress on the importance of the unconscious in the creation of poetry. This sinking deeper into the mind also connects Strand with surrealism. Surrealism has many characteristics, but only a few of which can be found in Strand’s poetry. He allows the images in his poetry to be influenced by ‘the vegetation of the unconscious’, but his poetry is free from the unrestrained whimsicalities which one finds in the poetry and paintings of many surrealists. Perceptual, emotive and extremely evocative, Strand’s poetry in spite of the invasion of the unconscious on his muse, is disarmingly simple. The difficulty in reading Strand arises, not on account of allusions and references as in Eliot but on account of the extremely subjective images which have their fountains in the unconscious. This paper seeks to make a critical reading of Strand’s poetry which relies on donations from the unconscious yet gives this mode aesthetic dignity.
Keywords
Unconscious; Subjective School; Deep Imagism; Surrealism; Allusions; Mark Strand.
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