Blackberry Eating

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.