Everyman is Me: The Poetics of Pacifism in the Work of Kenneth Patchen

American Poet Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972), an elder figure to the more well-known beat poets of the 1950s and 60s, began his career by championing progressive, proletarian values and exposing the plight of working class Americans, which he was familiar with by virtue of growing up in a small town in Ohio dominated by the steel industry. He sought to expose the callous destruction of the natural world as well as of human beings caused by the industry, in poems like “The Orange Bears: Childhood in an Ohio Milltown” and attempted to craft a vision of a better human future characterized by a kind of spiritual communism in works like *Before the Brave.* At the outbreak of World War II, this empathy toward those who had been maimed and destroyed by capitalist systems burgeoned into a world-wide empathic connection to those now facing death at the hands of the global conflagration.

While the world around him, many of his contemporary poets and artists included, rallied to support the cause of the Allies, Patchen, a lifelong ardent pacifist, responded to the war in a radically different manner. He saw it as a form of collective insanity in which human beings had lost sight of their essential nature and being, which he understood to be characterized by an esoteric universal identity in which each person shares. This universal identity, representing a kind of cosmological gnosis replete with hidden correspondences between spiritual and material worlds, was experienced by Patchen himself, and he sought to articulate it throughout his work. He also attempted to express its implications vis-à-vis the mass-scale destruction and slaughter of human beings then taking place. His vision was directly inspired by William Blake’s similar conception of the universal man, Albion, in works such as *Jerusalem,* *The Four Zoas,* and *America: A Prophecy.* Albion represents the collective identity of humanity, whose senses (the Zoas) have become deranged such that all of humanity “falls” with Albion into a degraded state (Blake’s “vegetable world”). Like Blake, Patchen sought to restore humanity’s true perception, and thereby also to restore the true spiritual state of the world – “the eye altering, alters all” as Blake put it.

Patchen responded to the great war with his most famous work, the experimental prose novel, *The Journal of Albion Moonlight* (1941), directly invoking the Blakean figure. The *Journal* is nominally about a journey by a group of travelers led by Albion, toward Galen, the home of a savior figure (literally “Roivas”) and “presumably the place of peace and fulfillment.” “Their pilgrimage is also a missionary venture into America, a last desperate attempt to reestablish innocence” in a society that was at the time at war. Patchen’s pacifist convictions and commitment to nonviolence are reflected in Albion Moonlight, who is simply the poetic aspect of Patchen. For Patchen himself, it is “a journal of the summer of 1940 – that plague summer when all the codes and ethics which men had lived by for centuries were subjected to the acid test of general war and universal disillusionment.” Henry Miller called it “a seismological record of an inner explosion” which “does not record the outer chaos produced by the dissolution of a world but reproduces that chaos as it is experienced hour by hour in the heart of a sensitive being.” It also represents a nonviolent means of fighting against the war, of ending the war, through poetic practice.

The theme of the universal identity of humanity, and the dire necessity of its recognition as a counter to prevailing social forces which Patchen saw as bent on human exploitation, violence, and death, would go on to characterize virtually all of his work following the Journal. It is evident in his poetry collections, *The Last Will and Testament* (1941) and *An Astonished Eye Looks Out from the Air* (1945), as well as in his other two prose works, *Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer* (1945) and *Sleepers Awake* (1946). The poem, “Nice Day for a Lynching” from *First Will,* for instance, has the poet observing a lynching where he experiences himself as both the man being hung and those hanging him – “until it changes, I shall be forever killing; and be killed.” And in the poem, “The Way Men Live is a Lie” from An Astonished Eye, he restates his essential vision and commitment to nonviolence:  

There is only one truth in the world:

Until we learn to love our neighbor,

There will be no life for anyone.

The man who says, “I don’t believe in war,

But after all somebody must protect us”-

Is obviously a fool – and a liar.

Is this so hard to understand!

That who supports murder, is a murderer?

That who destroys his fellow, destroys himself?

Force cannot be overthrown by force

To hate any man is to despair of every man

Patchen’s personal life was also marked by extreme suffering due to a severe back injury he sustained, compounded by a botched surgery, which left him bedridden for much of his later life. As his back pain made it increasingly difficult for him to write or work for long stretches of time, Patchen’s creative efforts shifted toward the medium of picture-poems, again following in the footsteps of Blake. Yet here the themes of Albion and essential humanistic pacificism remain fundamental. One of his final picture-poems from 1971 summarizes Patchen’s central conviction and the fact that it remained the single most important theme for his work throughout his career. Two creatures face each other, leaning toward one another, surrounded by the words: “Everyman is me, I am his brother. No man is my enemy. I am everyman and he is in and of me. This is my faith, my strength, my deepest hope, and my only belief.” Patchen’s poetic vision represents a challenge to even the most seemingly justified uses of violence, arguing that such force can never be a victory, but only a degradation of humanity and a scar on its own collective body.