Dr. James Meetze is the award-winning author of five books of poetry and an adjunct faculty of Pacifica’s M.A. in Depth Psychology and Creativity with Emphasis in the Arts and Humanities as well as being an alumni of Pacifica’s M.A./Ph.D. in Mythological Studies with Emphasis in Depth Psychology.
When I speak to students in the Depth Psychology and Creativity program about poetry, I am speaking about poiesis, which in the Greek (ποίησις) means “making, creating, producing,” or to bring something novel into being—creative output in any medium. But I am after all a poet, so I also mean poetry. The very pulse of creation, for a poet attuned to its deeper rhythms, often feels less like an act of will and more like an act of witness—of listening through the language. If one is really listening in the process of creation, the act of crafting a poem is rarely a solitary, purely conscious endeavor. There are moments—you might recognize them—when language arrives, not as chosen word or phrase, but as an insistent presence, a current from a deeper river. This mystery of influence and inspiration, this sense of being seized by forces from without, forms the core of C. G. Jung’s (1966) captivating essay, “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,” found in the Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 15: The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature.
Perhaps more than any poet’s work, it is this singular essay to which I return most frequently in trying to better understand my role, my vocation, as both a poet and educator. In it, Jung (1966) posits that the poet, in their profound creative act, becomes a conduit for outside, unconscious forces that transcend the personal impetus to put words in a certain order. These words arrive “fully arrayed into the world, as Pallas Athene sprang from the head of Zeus….[the poet] is overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts and images which he never intended to create and which his own will could never have brought into being” (Jung, 1966, p. 73). If this also sounds like a divinatory practice, I say yes, and.
In a contemporary poetic context amid profound ecological crises, technostate domination, social unrest, and psychic fragmentation, Jung’s insight into the collective unconscious as a wellspring of mythic vision and language remains not only relevant but essential to our relationship with the sacred. For a poet, to engage this relationship is to engage in a visionary poetics. It is a poetics that Jung (1966) makes a point to distinguish from the psychological mode, which draws “from the sphere of conscious human experience—from the psychic foreground of life” (p. 90). These poems are generally relatable, accessible, easy to digest. In contrast, the visionary mode, arises from a deeper, impersonal stratum: the collective unconscious. This poem, Jung (1966) writes, is “something strange that derives its existence from the hinterland of man’s mind, as if it had emerged from the abyss of prehuman ages, or from a superhuman world” (p. 90) The visionary poet does not merely express their personal psyche; rather, they become a vessel through which primordial images—archetypes—irrupt into consciousness. These archetypes, outside forces larger than the individual, compel the poet to give form to something that feels both utterly foreign and yet deeply, universally human.
It is, to my thinking, the contemporary equivalent of the ancient oracle, the sibyl through whom the god speaks. In this sense, the language and image are not individual memories but inherited predispositions to respond to the world in certain ways, manifesting as recurring mythic figures, situations, and symbols. They carry a formidable autonomy, a charge that can feel both terrifying and exhilarating. When these archetypes emerge into the poetic imagination, they often bring with them a sense of urgency, a demand to be witnessed and given voice. I have felt this myself, in the unexpected arrival of a line, a phrase, a rhythm that seems to bypass the intellect entirely, originating from a place both ancient and new. It is the language of the anima mundi, whispering through the individual throat.
My former teacher, the poet Nathaniel Mackey, beautifully articulates this process. “It’s psyche. In the deepest sense, it’s meaning,” Mackey (2012) writes. “It’s what we mean by trying to find meaning in our lives. Language, of course, is an essential instrument of that and poetry is nothing if not the use of that instrument, the carrying of that instrument to certain lengths and hopefully heights in which the work of soul-making is advanced.” This “work of soul-making” is not merely about aesthetic accomplishment; it is a sacred task, a metaphysical labor through which the soul, both personal and collective, finds articulation.
Jung concludes his essay with an uncharacteristic humility and an invocation of the reader’s imaginative participation: “I hope that what I have been obliged to omit, that is to say [the practical application of my views] to poetic works of art, has been furnished by your own thoughts, thus giving flesh and blood to my abstract intellectual frame,” (p. 83). Indeed, it is what Jung alludes to but does not resolve that keeps me returning to this slim volume nearly two decades after first encountering it. His open-endedness is not a lacunae but an invitation—one that charges the reader with completing the bridge between the abstract and the embodied, the mythic and the modern.
The poet’s task as a medium for these unconscious forces becomes ever more vital. The personal reservoir of contemporary suffering may be deep, but it is not bottomless. Eventually, one’s private story can no longer bear the weight of what must be said. It is then that the deeper currents surge forth—the ancestral, the mythic, the archetypal. Contemporary poetry—and not the Instagram stuff—that works to confront climate collapse, genocide, or communal despair often finds its most potent expressions don’t originate in the poet alone but in the raw, undifferentiated material of human existence. The challenge—and the charge—is to surrender. To allow the terrifying beauty of these primordial images to speak through one’s own particular voice.
This paradox—that the most personal becomes possible only through surrendering the personal—offers a new vision of authorship. In losing oneself, one becomes a vessel. In becoming a vessel, one becomes most fully and creatively human. The poet does not assert, but listens; does not control, but channels. In this mode, the poem becomes more than words on a page or screen—it becomes a bridge between realms, a form shaped by formlessness.
Thus, Jung’s insights—the surface of which I’ve only scratched here—endure not only as theory but as spiritual and artistic practice. The poet’s sacred task is to bear witness to the real and the numinous—to shape language around the said and the unsayable. The poem—the work of art in any medium, really—allows the ancient myths to continue their essential work of orienting us within the grand, bewildering cosmology of existence. It reminds us that the daimon—however unsettling—is often the true muse.
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References
Jung, C. G. (1966). On the relation of analytical psychology to poetry. (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read
et al. (Eds.), The Collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 15. The Spirit in man, art, and literature (pp.
65–83). Princeton University Press.
Mackey, N. (2012, August 24). An Interview with Nathaniel Mackey by Paul E. Nelson.
Dr. James Meetze is the award-winning author of five books of poetry and editor of Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems by James Schuyler. His sixth book, The Long Now, is forthcoming in 2026. He is Professor of writing and Chair of Honors at the University of Arizona Global Campus and adjunct faculty of Pacifica’s M.A. in Depth Psychology and Creativity with Emphasis in the Arts and Humanities.
