Dr. Nessma Abdel Tawab Salim
A Lecturer of English Literature in the Faculty of Education, October 6 University, Egypt
dr.nessmasalim@gmail.com
00201140442138
Abstract
This research aims at exploring the relationship between archetypal patterns and literature; especially modern poetry. Carl Jung understood archetypes as universal archaic patterns and images derived from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct. The term “archetype” means an original pattern in Ancient Greek. Jung used this concept in his theory of the human psyche. Jung describes these archetypes as innate, inborn in the collective unconscious. For Jung, these archetypes are most reflected in poetry; as they are timeless primordial processes. According to the great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, Archetypes are specific modes of perception and comprehension, based on inherited psychical images that influenced human consciousness on a personal collective scale. Maud Bodkin’s Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934) has planted the seed of archetypal criticism in the soil of literary analysis. (Unani, Psychoanalysis of Carl Jung)
True modern poetry of English literature is said to begin in the middle of the 19th century. When Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, it caused an outrage amongst the authorities because it dealt with personal subjects like sex, war, and the physical body; comprehended by the innate inherited archetype. His book has not only opened the door for more adventurous American poets to experiment with language and look for things with new eyes and vision, leaving behind the traditional vision, but it also opened a new gate for an emotional pattern; an archetypal pattern that is common with readers of past and modern generations.
Keywords: Archetypes, primordial images, symbolism, collective unconscious, human experiences, and emotions.
الانماط الفطرية والرموز في الشعر الانكليزي الحديث
دراسة تحليلية نفسية للصور الشعرية
د.نسمة عبد التواب سالم الدرس
جامعة السادس من اكتوبر
الملخص:
يهدف هذا البحث إلى استكشاف العلاقة بين الأنماط البدائية والأدب خاصة الشعر الحديث فهم كارل يونج النماذج البدائية على أنها أنماط وصور قديمة مستمدة من اللاوعي الجماعي وهي النظير النفسي للغريزة. مصطلح “النموذج الأصلي” يعني النمط الأصلي في اليونانية القديمة. استخدم يونغ هذا المفهوم في نظريته عن النفس البشرية. يصف يونغ هذه النماذج الأصلية بأنها فطرية ، فطرية في اللاوعي الجماعي. بالنسبة ليونغ ، تنعكس هذه النماذج البدائية في الشعر ؛ لأنها عمليات بدائية خالدة. وفقًا للطبيب النفسي السويسري العظيم كارل جوستاف يونج ، فإن النماذج الأصلية هي أنماط محددة من الإدراك والفهم ، بناءً على الصور النفسية الموروثة التي أثرت على الوعي البشري على نطاق شخصي جماعي. زرع Maud Bodkin’s Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934) بذرة النقد البدائي في تربة التحليل الأدبي. (محمد عناني ، التحليل النفسي لكارل يونغ)
يقال إن الشعر الحديث الحقيقي للأدب الإنجليزي بدأ في منتصف القرن التاسع عشر. عندما نشر والت ويتمان كتاب Leaves of Grass في عام 1855 ، أثار غضب السلطات لأنه تعامل مع مواضيع شخصية مثل الجنس والحرب والجسد المادي ؛ يفهمها النموذج الأصلي الموروث. لم يفتح كتابه الباب أمام المزيد من الشعراء الأمريكيين المغامرين لتجربة اللغة والبحث عن الأشياء في عيون ورؤية جديدة ، تاركًا وراءه الرؤية التقليدية ، ولكنه فتح أيضًا بابًا جديدًا لنمط عاطفي ؛ نمط أصلي مشترك مع قراء الأجيال الماضية والحديثة.
الكلمات المفتاحية:
النماذج البدائية ، الصور البدائية ، الرمزية ، اللاوعي الجماعي ، الخبرات البشرية ، والعواطف.
The Archetypal Symbolism in Modern English Poetry: A Psychological Approach of Imagism
Carl Jung understood archetypes as universal archaic patterns and images derived from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct. The term “archetype” means an original pattern in Ancient Greek. Jung used this concept in his theory of the human psyche. Jung describes these archetypes as innate, inborn in the collective unconscious. For Jung, these archetypes are most reflected in poetry; as they are timeless primordial processes. According to the great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, Archetypes are specific modes of perception and comprehension, based on inherited psychical images that influenced human consciousness on a personal collective scale. Maud Bodkin’s Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934) has planted the seed of archetypal criticism in the soil of literary analysis (Unani).
In their book Modern Criticism: Theory and Practice, Walter Sutton and Richard Foster review Maud Bodkin’s theory of the relation of analytical psychology to poetic art, saying that Maud establishes her theory on Jung’s hypothesis of the psychological significance of poetry. For Jung, the special emotional significance possessed by certain poems, beyond common meaning, is stirred in the reader’s mind within or beneath his conscious response, by unconscious forces which Jung calls “primordial images” or archetypes. These archetypes are a numberless series of experiences of the same type. Unani asserts that these experiences have happened, not necessarily to the individual himself, but to his ancestors. Consequently, the results are inherited in the structure of the brain.
In his book Romanticism and Postmodernism, Edward Larrissy defines postmodernism in English poetry as a “shift from the description of a range of aesthetic practices involving playful irony, parody, parataxis, self-consciousness, fragmentation, to use which encompasses a more general shift in thought and seems to register a pervasive cynicism about the progressivist ideas of modernity. (1) Larry adds that it is the death of grand narratives; it is an intellectual, artistic cultural outlook that is suspicious of hierarchy and objective knowledge adopting complexity, contradiction, and ambiguity.
Archetypal literary criticism moves in several directions at the same time: textual, inter-textual and psychological. Bjorklund, in his book Contemporary Literary Critics, explains this by saying that a reader may identify archetypes of the plot, characters, imagery, and settings of the literary work of art. Archetypal criticism of literature became most widespread among modern literary critics. For Bjorklund, Maud Bodkin has greatly changed the vision of poetry with her theory.
True modern poetry of English literature is said to begin in the middle of the 19th century. When Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, it caused an outrage amongst the authorities because it dealt with personal subjects like sex, war, and the physical body; comprehended by the innate inherited archetype. His book has not only opened the door for more adventurous American poets to experiment with language and look for things with new eyes and vision, leaving behind the traditional vision, but it also opened a new gate for an emotional pattern; an archetypal pattern that is common with readers of past and modern generations.
Archetypal criticism, according to Carl Jung, is a critical theory that studies the recurring narrative structures, character types, themes, and images that are commonly shared by people of different cultures and traditions. In his book English Language and Literary Criticism, Kharbe describes archetypal criticism’s origins as “rooted in two other academic disciplines, social anthropology and psychoanalysis; each contributes to literary criticism in separate ways, with the latter being a sub-branch of the critical theory” (327). This enhances very much of Enani’s view of archetypal criticism in his book Carl Gustav Jung’s Analytical Psychology, where he affirms that archetype as a concept is a way of categorizing and exploring human experiences manifesting in a variety of intellectual contexts, ranging from Plato’s concept of forms to Kant’s classifications of human cognition and beyond. Unani believes that archetypes are rooted in-depth, according to Jung, in human psychology; “for Jung, archetypes are visible manifestations of something rooted in the deepest soil of human experience” (3) Larsen.
In his book Contributions to Analytical Psychology, Carl Jung defines archetype as
A figure, whether it be a daemon, man, or process,
that repeats itself in the course of history wherever
creative phantasy is freely manifested. Essentially,
therefore, it is a mythological figure. If we subject
t these images to a closer investigation, we discover
them to be the formulated resultants of
countless typical experiences of our ancestors.
They are, as it were, the psychic residua of
numberless experiences of the same type…Each of
these images contain a piece of human psychology
and human destiny, a relic of suffering or delight
that has happened countless times in our ancestral
story (247).
Khare declares that “the advent of post-modern theory initially dampened the interest and influence of archetype theory, but in recent years many writers and scholars have responded to the misconceptions and misrepresentation often found in post-modern critiques of archetypal theory” (327). Applying this to modern poetry, archetypal images are realized as examples of symbolism. They can symbolize, thanks to their pictorial vivid nature. Cengage Learning in A Study Guide for Imagism describes imagism as
flourished in Britain and the United States for a brief period that is generally considered to be somewhere between 1909 and 1917. As part of the modernist movement, away from the sentimentality and moralizing tone of nineteenth-century Victorian poetry, imagist poets looked to many sources to help them create a new poetic expression (2).
Creating a new poetic expression is extremely tied to archetypal patterns since this new poetic expression is a concrete presentation of a fragmented vision of the human brain. This fragmented incomplete vision is a technique that symbolizes the modern mind, the incoherent universal experiences; that is simply the inherited archetypal experience latent in human deep memory. According to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, the world is coherent, but our perception of it is always incomplete and fragmented. Therefore since modern poetry explores fragmentation and incomplete vision of human beings, it is the best mould that reflects archetypal theory, David Perkins (224).
In his book An Introduction to Poetry, Tiempo says:
The liberation of contemporary poetry from
the traditional rigidity in rhyme and scansion
was anticipated by Walt Whitman in his collection
of poems Leaves of Grass, published 1855.
However, Whitman’s lines are long, diffuse,
and rhetorical, whereas as mentioned, the usual
imagist lines are short and packed. Another
difference is the fact that the idea in an imagist
the poem is resident in the image rather than stated
in outright statements such as we find in
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (121).
The fourth edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, 1867 is the first edition to appear with accumulation; he adds sheets from other works, more experiences that enrich the fourth edition, (29) Charles M. Oliver. In Leaves of Gras’s fourth edition, Whitman adds “Abroad at a Ship’s Helm” part in which he echoes Coleridge’s ship of the Ancient Mariner, saying:
ABOARD at a ship’s helm,
A young steersman steering with care.
Through fog on a sea coast dolefully ringing,
An ocean bell—O a warning bell, rocked by the waves.
O you give good notice indeed, you bell by the sea-reefs ringing,
Ringing, ringing, to warn the ship from its wreck-place.
For as on the alert O steersman, you mind the loud admonition,
The bows turn, the freighted ship tacking speeds away under her
grey sails,
The beautiful and noble ship with all her precious wealth speeds
away gayly and safe.
But O the ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship!
Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging (1867)
Whitman alludes to the life-death journey of human beings. He hints at the human soul that travels from birth to death. All human beings share the experience of descending to earth and having an endless timeless number of experiences and adventures. All this has made an innate, inherited mark upon our souls, as living beings. It is through this voyage that Whitman mentions, that readers discover that ancient records and archetypal patterns are part of our personal cosmic history. Cosmic history is a mixture of abstract experiences, feelings, spiritual material and human existence. The ship in Whitman’s poem is an echo of Coleridge’s ship of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Both ships do represent the journey of life and death for human brains. In other words, the first impression that occurs to the minds of readers or listeners of the word “ship or voyage” is the journey from life to death. This is the archetype that is inherited and engraved in the minds and psychology of all human beings. As Enani asserts, the voyage is the symbol of the mariner’s life: his path to sin and his subsequent repentance. This is the same in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The voyage is the journey from sin to repentance or from life to death. It is the archetypal pattern of the changing pattern of human nature; either from sin to repentance, life to death, damnation to salvation and so on.
The ship may be the symbol of the human body that sails through the sea of sins. In “through the fog on a sea-coast dolefully ringing, an ocean bell-O a warning bell rocked by the waves”, the image is veiled by the foreboding threatening “warning” bell which is indicative of an evil presence that destroys the goodness and calmness of the ocean. The ocean itself is a symbol of insecurity and danger for human beings; “the frightened ship tacking speeds away under her grey sails”, is another foreboding image of a sterile future that is grey like ashes. Towards the end of this part of the poem, the ship turns out to be a prison that holds the human soul. Stuck in the wide frightening ocean, it is a source of punishment for sinners; all human beings.
In William Carlos William’s Danse Russe, he creates an image of loneliness. Loneliness as an archetypal emotion evokes sadness, gloom and nostalgia for all human beings. This is a recurrent controlling theme in almost all of Williams’s works. In the first line of Danse Russe he says:
If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
where he creates many symbols and archetypes. The image of a wife and a “baby sleeping” is an archetypal image of death, loneliness, and potential life ceases; as sleep is a form of temporary death. This scene of temporary death is enlightened by the presence of the sun and flame-white disc; which is the symbol of God that evokes the emotion of forgiveness, grace and redemption. The archetypal pattern here is common to all human beings since the sun and light are the symbols of a new beginning, clarity, vision, and divine power. Williams continues by saying:
if I am in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt around my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
He sings softly to himself. The poem ends with the universal feeling of loneliness, at least experienced and lived once in a lifetime.
The feeling of loneliness is detected in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland as well. Richard Gray in his book A Brief History of American Literature, states that
the wasteland continues this lonely drama of the self. Of course, any genuinely imaginative reading of Eliot’s most famous poem is likely to yield larger cultural inferences. Like the Cantos, The Wasteland uses a form of the ideogrammic method, dense patterns of imagery and a disjunctive narrative sequence, a radical juxtaposition of different perspectives and languages to solicit an active response, a collaboration in the creation of meanings…The Wasteland was a cry from the lonely self (29).
The primordial image, the psychic residue of loneliness is an archetypal pattern in the collective unconscious of all human beings that is expressed and experienced in Eliot’s The Wasteland. The great despair of modern existence does not only feel out of a sense of meaninglessness but also from very strong loneliness. Eliot makes this feeling of loneliness universal by admitting that it is a feeling we create for ourselves by constantly pursuing our selfish interests;
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet (64-65)
These people described in the poem are flowing on London Bridge like dead bodies; a reminder of Pound’s apparitions of the Metro Station. They seem so selfish; nobody cares even to look at one another, since “each man fixed his eyes before his feet” (65). This is an archetypal image of the daily routine of modern life. Eliot wants to give the impression of the emotional sadness caused by modern civilization; which consequently leads people to forget the presence of each other. This is an archetypal impression felt by all human souls that are preoccupied with their living. As the central image of the Wasteland is the sterility of modern western civilization, it is simply a death-rebirth archetype. Maud Bodkin in her book Archetypal Pattern in Poetry, comments on the Wasteland saying that
The aspect of the poem which I wish to consider here is its character as exemplifying the pattern I have termed a rebirth. Notably, the poem accomplishes—in Jung’s phrase— a translation of the primordial image into the language of the present, through its gathering into simultaneity of impression images from the remote past with incidents and phrases of the everyday present. (308)
According to Nidhi Tiwari in his book Imagery and symbolism in T. S Eliot’s Poetry,
Maud Bodkin relates the rebirth archetype with the Night Journey in the Book of Jonah. She remarks ‘before a renewal of life can come about, Jung urges, there must be an acceptance of the possibilities that lie in the unconscious contents activated through regression…and disfigured by the slime of the deep’. The principle with he thus expounds Jung recognizes as reflected in the myth of the night journey under the sea (14-15).
Each reader of Death by Water (IV), finds himself voyaging on the sea where he starts the journey of death and rebirth. The archetype of death by water is associated with renewal, rebirth and regeneration. Phlebas dies by drowning, forgetting his worldly issues, problems and cares. Here Eliot addresses the hearts of his readers to consider Phlebas and recall his or her mortality; an archetypal pattern of life and death.
The poem is divided into five parts I) The Burial of the Dead, II) A Game of Chess, III) The Fire Sermon, IV) Death by Water and V) What the Thunder Said. The title of the first part is an archetype. The Burial of the dead is an allusion to the burial service of the Christian Church; the Book of Common Prayer.
In
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers. (1-7)
“Eliot has placed contrasting archetypal images alternately, that is, the images of rebirth and death-in-life. We have archetypal images of rebirth in ‘breeding lilacs’ out of the dead land and stirring dull roots with spring rain. The archetypal images of death in life are expressed in ‘winter kept us warm, covering the Earth in forgetful snow’ and ‘little life with dried tubers” (Tiwari 177).
In the second part of The Wasteland, A Game of Chess, Eliot creates an archetype of the social hierarchal system that contains kings, queens, pawns, knights, rooks, and Bishops. It is automatically aroused in readers’ minds that the universe is not but a game of chess, based on positions and social status. This hierarchy is not innocent of treachery. Ackerley comments on this, in his book T.S. Eliot: The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock, and The Wasteland, saying “the later title suggests the monotony of an existence broken only by such diversions as chess, and hints at sexual tension and betrayal” (43). Tiwari supports this interpretation by confirming, “imagery and symbolism related to escape archetype and betrayal archetype leads to the dominant archetypal imagery and symbolism of death-in-life” (199). That is why Eliot depicts human life as shallow and meaningless where people are partly dead while alive.
The Fire Sermon section is an archetype of the Buddhist fire sermon. When a reader hears this title, it soon occurs to his mind the sermon of purgation of the human soul, heart and body. It is through burning the body with its sins, as believed by some people, that the soul is shifted from damnation to salvation. However, it is still a gloomy hint about the sinful life of human beings. The river Thames in this section is an archetype of cleanliness, purity, and reincarnation, (Enani 21) as water is a life-giver to all creatures. Bently and Brooker comment in their book Reading the Wasteland: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation, saying that “the controlling allusion in The Fire Sermon, by force of Eliot’s title, is to the fire sermon of Buddha… the Buddha’s sermon delivered to a thousand priests, consists of three questions and three answers” (121). The three questions and answers are related to the senses of human beings, their desires, and sins that are redeemed by fire. Fire is an archetype of both torture and purgation.
In his book On Life’s Journey: Always Becoming, Daniel A. Lindley suggests that
the term archetype invokes ‘the mind of God’ because it designates an aspect of underlying, eternal order. Such order is beyond ordinary folk-indeed, it is beyond all human beings. It may be described as ‘ The Mind of God’ or it may be represented by Plato’s conception of ideal forms. Such things are not knowable, and something that is not knowable may as well not exist. But the archetypes do manifest themselves in our lives, in our daily round. Rather than continuing this abstract discussion, I turn instead to a concrete instance of the manifestation of a particular archetype in a tiny poem. It is a haiku by Ezra Pound:
in a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough (9).
The most famous archetype of a metro or a train is the image of the journey from birth to death. The image in Pound’s poem is clear. The faces of the passengers in the metro station are transitory and temporary. Each train leaves the station soon, carrying a huge number of people; faces; a typical image of human life. A generation passes to deliver life to another. Human life is as short as those minutes the train waits at the station to collect its condemned people. Lindley continues by saying, “the image of the petals reminds us of the transitoriness of spring, of generativity of beauty” (9). The black colour in the poem corresponds to the gloomy melancholic atmosphere of the inevitable death of these living faces. The black colour is an archetypal pattern of sadness, death, and vagueness. These archetypes do prepare readers to accept their mortality; since the apparition of these faces is another archetype of hollowness, barrenness, and sterility. These faces are ghosts. As archetypes are universals,(Enani 63-65), this poem echoes Eliot’s Wasteland and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It faces readers with the fact that amid life, death is encountered and rooted. The archetype of the journey is almost encountered in most modern poems. Lindley affirms that “archetypes can not be described concretely in themselves, because they are abstractions, generalizations, ideas, but they are represented in experiences all the time” (10). Unani enhances this viewpoint by adding that the idea of the archetype is linked to the collective unconscious, in which appear archaic primordial types, with universal images that have existed before. In studying the implications of motifs, it is discovered that the same object may hold vastly different meanings in different cultures; but still, it is a motif with a symbolic archetypal implication (152).
The same journey is encountered in Alfred Tennyson’s Lotus Eaters. The journey is a symbolic archetypal one, taken from Homer’s Odyssey. After the fall of Troy, Odysseus’ sailors, Odysseus himself is an archetypal man of a brave mission, are forced to land in a strange country. This land is that of the “mild-eyed melancholy Lotus-eaters”. These inhabitants are sustained only on the fruit of Lotus. This fruit has the effect of a drug that makes human beings unconscious. According to Rajni Singh, the fruit may also be the archetype of the forbidden apple of Eden. He says:
The poem is to be read, keeping in mind the story of Hercules who steals the fruit for the sake of humanity. The body of the poem is the story of the three sisters. The Hesperides maidens are introduced by a blank verse prologue that fuses historical allusion with myth. Discussing its sources, Ricks suggests the religious mythologizing of G.S. Faber, Milton’s Paradise Lost…The East and West had a special significance for Tennyson. The golden apple has the virtue of being the treasure of the west. Tennyson connects the West with images of the sea, of growth and paradoxically of death…The garden—isle of the Hesperides is an archetypal image and though it has a private significance for him, Tennyson preserves its mythological character. His garden of Hesperides is the garden of wisdom.. while describing the nature pictures, Tennyson shows extreme sensitiveness. The creation of art and poetry is symbolized as the creation of golden apples (30-32).
The sailors also lose their desire to go back home and get back to their families, after eating this fruit. This lost desire is an archetype of the lost desire of modern man to continue his life journey in these hardships.
Lloyd Austin in his book Poetic Principles and Practice, says
But these are the traditional hopes and longings for the life to come. The last two quatrains introduce an entirely new and original note, although the imagery is derived from Tennyson’s Ulysses, and ultimately from Dante, who invented the story of Ulysses’ last fatal voyage beyond the baths of all the western stars. Dante leads the ship to its destruction; Tennyson suggests that the gulfs may wash them down: but Bandelaire makes this last voyage the symbol of the passage from life to death, and in this conclusion, he sweeps away all that is known or imagined of the world beyond the grave (16).
All things have rest: why should we toil alone,
We only toil, who are the first of things,
And make perpetual moan, (II Lotus Eaters)
The life of toil and hard work is the ghost that the lotus-eaters would like to abandon. They decided to quit their journey of hardships and stay idly in the land of lotus-eaters; the forbidden garden. This is an archetype of modern man’s longing for a calm life free of responsibilities.
Another basic archetype in the poem is the recurrent image of the waves:
“Courage!” he said, and pointed toward the land,
“This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon.”
In the afternoon they came unto a land
In which it seemed always afternoon (I).
The mounting wave is a recurrent image that runs all through the poem. These waves are the archetype of changing conditions of human beings. Waves represent vagueness, hard work, and an unknown future. Some lines later in the poem, sailors declare that their home is beyond the waves:
Then someone said, “We will return no more”;
And all at once, they sang, “Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam” (45).
The wave here is a symbol of the ocean; the whole life of human beings. According to Tiwari “images and symbols have always been the soul of poetry. Poets in all ages, in all countries and all languages, have employed these devices to enhance their expression and create an impact on the reader” (1); this quotation ties imagery and symbols to poetry. Since imagery is part of archetype as Schaverien defines archetype in his book The Revealing Image: Analytical Art Psychotherapy in Theory and Practice, saying “it is a psychosomatic concept, linking body and psyche, instinct and image. Archetypes underlie the impact of fairy tales, myths, certain rituals and traditions. They are also recognizable in the dream and images which are created by the individual human psyche” (21). Unani in Carl Gustav Jung’s Analytical Psychology agrees with Schaverien, adding that these archetypal images do not take a specific form; they are however latent in the collective unconscious. He believes they are evident in actions and feelings. There is always a special stimulus that activates certain archetypes at a particular occasion in the life of an individual. Although the source is universal, there is still an individual dimension. It is noticed that many different people with different cultures and backgrounds, in similar psychic situations, do produce very similar archetypal reactions, due to having similar mental storage of the same implication of images in innate memory. Unani confirms it was essential for Jung to state that it is not the content of an image that is archetypal rather than the unconscious and un-representable outline or pattern that is fundamental (20-25).
In his book Singing the Chaos: Madness and Wisdom in Modern Poetry, William Pratt sums up the relation between imagism and archetype as follows:
The aims of the imagist movement in poetry provide the archetype of a modern creative procedure, and since imagism was the metamorphosis in another language of French symbolism, modernism may be regarded as a continuation from the symbolists to the imagists (17).
The relationship between literature and psychology has deep implications. The greatness of a literary work of art arises from its psychological universal dimension, represented in images and consequently archetype (Enani 23). In the 20th century, archetypal criticism is commonly used especially with the mixture of literature and psychology. Archetypal criticism breaks the boundaries between different cultures, backgrounds, traditions and religions. Archetypal criticism elevates the literary text to a higher status of a universal humanistic enterprise.
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