A Poet of Philosophy and Prayer

There is an old saying that goes, “once a Catholic, always a Catholic.” Since the sacrament of baptism leaves an indelible mark, even should one deny the faith and leave the Church, that mark remains imprinted on the person’s soul. In the case of poet Helen Pinkerton (1927-2017), this saying holds true. Baptized as a child in Montana to a family of non-practicing Catholics, Pinkerton didn’t fully embrace her faith until later in life and was confirmed when she was much older. Surprisingly, perhaps, it was her classes at Stanford University (which had just begun accepting women when she entered) with the non-Catholic poet Yvor Winters that ultimately revived her faith. Studying with Winters would be the turning point for her life in many ways; it introduced her to her husband, convinced her to pursue a career in poetry instead of journalism, and informed both her personal faith and philosophy, which she constantly explored through her poetry. As a result of this influence and the questions about being that ultimately led to her acceptance of Catholicism, Pinkerton’s poetry can best be understood as a collection of philosophical inquiries and dialogue with God in prayer.

Winter’s impact can be traced among those in his circle who, like Pinkerton, studied with him, including Edgar Bowers, Thom Gunn, Turner Cassity, J.V. Cunningham, and Winters’ wife, Janet Lewis. In Pinkerton’s case, her poetry exhibits a foundational understanding of Thomas Aquinas that shapes her writing and her philosophy of being—something she took from Winters. As the poet James Matthew Wilson has written, “Astonished by the profound metaphysics found in Saint Thomas Aquinas and in his modern-day disciple Etienne Gilson, Pinkerton explored the act of existence as a gift and revelation of God as Being Itself and as the fundamental fact with which the human soul must reckon.” Much of her poetry centers on this theme and finds its way—whether the topic is a return to her childhood home or on a painting by Winslow Homer—to meditate on the nature of being. Wilson goes on to explain that “Pinkerton saw in herself and in our culture a ravenous hunger to subordinate being to our own private wills… again and again, we strive to remake being in our own willful image. This lust is a sin whether or not we avow it, whether or not, she writes, you can ‘name / The creditor you owe.’” Whether or not a person realizes this is also important to Pinkerton’s poetry, as she often writes to remind readers (and herself) to think about being since it is usually taken for granted or not thought about at all.

Winters himself describes Pinkerton’s poetry as “profoundly philosophical and religious.” The scholar Cynthia Haven remarks on her blog for Stanford that, “Helen became preoccupied with the Thomistic notion of esse, and sees ‘nothingness’ as the primary temptation of humankind.” This supports what Wilson observes and is also something the poet and critic Timothy Steele comments on in the afterword for the collection of Pinkerton’s poems titled Taken in Faith:

Philosophically, she seems to be a dualist, in the sense that she regards life as a continual negotiation between mutually essential, but seemingly opposed, elements. Her poems strive to balance and connect the transient and the timeless, matter and spirit, reason and faith, our particular lives and Being itself.

Steele mentions poems such as “Celebration” as well as other poems such as “Error Pursued: II” and “The Return” that “are haunted by the temptation to give up the struggle and settle for comforting but false simplifications.” Pinkerton was not afraid to critique her culture—something she shared with Winters—and these poems, as Steele notes, show her culture’s impulse to settle for easier explanations that serve the will and the ego, a tendency that has only strengthened in the years since Pinkerton’s passing.

The dualism that Steele describes is also a prominent feature in the poetry of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Richard Wilbur in that they observe the known world as a means of contemplating the mysterious and the unknown. Likely for this reason, these writers interested Pinkerton, which we can see in poems such as “On Emily Dickinson” or “Melville’s Letter to William Clark Russell.” As Pinkerton saw it, these poets wrote about metaphysical concepts, about the fathomable and the unfathomable, as she aimed to do. Like apples for Frost or death for Dickinson, the physical world and questions of existence prompted Pinkerton to write poems that explored the same esse that Aquinas had written about.

Even a moment that involves seeing a hawk fly across the sky or a trout jumping in a pool of water becomes an occasion for Pinkerton’s “profoundly philosophical and religious” meditation.

The speaker in “Red-Tailed Hawk” watches a hawk soar out of sight, seeming to “shift from nothingness toward flight.”* Although it seemed that the hawk shifted from nothingness to flight, the speaker in the poem goes on to say, “Yet it was real, the warm column of air— / Like being, unrecorded, always there.” The “warm column of air” is Pinkerton’s analogy for being; it is not seen, but it is what keeps the hawk in flight. Despite being invisible, it is real. Pinkerton herself is doing some shifting here; she shifts her reader’s attention to the fact that people are good at talking about the essence of things (what a hawk is), but not about existence (the fact that the hawk is). The latter is what’s more important in Pinkerton’s view and what she aims to understand in her poetry.

Similarly, her poem “The Pool” has an animal as its subject and contemplates what lies beyond existence. The poem’s speaker addresses a fish: “Rise to the surface, flex and spin and dart / Out of the water, in again, your leap / For the dragonfly that hums above defeated.” From this beginning, Pinkerton reminds readers that a fish naturally dwells in water, but that every time it rises to the surface—even just to catch a dragonfly—it approaches what lies beyond the water. It flirts with transcendence, by going briefly beyond the existence that it knows before falling back into the pool. Finally, “no leap takes you from these waters until / One day the brittle fly is cast and you, / Leaping and drawn at once, are pulled beyond / The flexions and reprisals of the pool.” The death of the fish as it’s caught by the “brittle fly” at the end of a fishing pole both ends its leaping and begins its experience beyond the pool. Pinkerton asks her readers to consider what lies beyond being as it is known, not just for the fish in the pool but also, by extension, for us after we’ve left behind our lives on this earth.  

Poems like “The Pool” do not arrive at answers. Many of Pinkerton’s poems are like this and are directed by questions rather than definitive statements. Her “Holy Sonnets” are devotional poems, although in them she admits to doubt and questioning. While she affirms that God would not withhold His grace, she acknowledges that she might withhold belief. The first of this pair of poems begins, “I did not see you even when I went / From the long afternoon’s forgetfulness / Into a night of knowing the distress / Of questioning your presence and intent.” Recalling John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV,” which uses the imperative in the first line to pray, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you / As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend,” the last lines of Pinkerton’s poem make similar requests. However, her poem’s speaker implores,

Be with me casual and concomitant
As gentle breathing in a midnight sleep,
When no one bids the breast to rise and fall.
 Be as a quiet fire of which I keep
Enduring warmth in blood the veins recall,
When love, released from too much freedom, tries
The film of cold on hands and lips and eyes.

Instead of the harsh battering of the heart found in the supplication of Donne’s poem, Pinkerton’s asks for a quieter, gentler visit from the Holy Spirit. Perhaps this is because Pinkerton remembers what it was to be a nonbeliever and knows that sometimes the “still, small voice” of God is the perfect pitch for a heart that is learning to tune itself to truth.

In the second sonnet in her pair of “Holy Sonnets,” Pinkerton is more direct about this. It starts with the speaker saying that, had she expected God to come at any moment with “bells and horns, the sounding of a drum,” she would have deceived herself because she understands that she “must travel to the end / Of me” and yet could still “contend / ‘Perhaps you’ll not be there’” and “fail to find you.” She knows she could still have held onto doubt about God because she has free will. And yet, denying truth does not make it less true. She concludes the poem by explaining, “For, though you, the same / Who waits upon the border, circumscribe / Infinity, denial in me was / Infinity and bore a different name.” This poem is a good example of what Steele said about the contradictions that exist simultaneously in Pinkerton’s poems. Like her other work, this poem contains both moments of belief and unbelief, of philosophy and prayer. Here, she confesses the human temptation toward denial if it serve one’s own will, but also prays that God would be a quiet fire to warm her blood. She prays for this, and yet also knows that having faith does not put an end to our questions about God.

She explores this further in a poem titled “And Who Is God?”. The short poem, packed with allusions to Exodus and Aquinas, asks, “And Who is God? The Is of Abraham, / Isaac, and Jacob, self-begun I Am, / Actual source of act, to-be of being? / Or Eros, fluent in our veins, decreeing / Action and passion, will, truth, or its sham? / Love’s ambiguities prevent our seeing.” Here, “Eros” refers to what she saw as the longing for nothingness plaguing her world, as well as her own early thinking. In an interview with Think Journal, she clarifies, “Real love is the love of being. Eros is the love of non-being.” And, as Steele notes again in his afterword, for Pinkerton, “The most obvious barrier to faith […] is egotism.” The self prevents clear sight and makes it difficult to see God, who is Love. Despite this, the journey of the mind (as the collection of her poems is aptly titled) that led Pinkerton to this understanding cannot be dismissed. All her doubts, questions, and false notions are what led Pinkerton to the truth.

In her poem “For An End,” Pinkerton addresses why the journey needed to happen as it did. “Had I not loved, / I had not believed, / And not believing, / Had been deceived,” its first stanza pronounces. Its next three stanzas continue:

            Had I not loved,
            I had not known
            Either your being
            Or my own.

            Had I not loved,
            I had not known
            That you could love
            Both mind and bone.

            Had you not loved,
            When your decree
            Seemed total loss,
            You had lost me.

These lines summarize the thinking of a mature Pinkerton, having experienced her journey from unbelief toward belief. Here she presents God as the uncaused cause, as love, and as being itself. She affirms, too, that when one reaches out in love, one is then led to knowing and loving God, and in turn, to knowing oneself. Had she never gone to Stanford, or taken classes with Winters, even had she never been an unbeliever, her poetry would not have come to be as it is. By reading her poetry, one can follow Pinkerton’s journey of the mind, away from Eros and the self through prayer and philosophy and the contemplation of existence, time, the physical world, and faith. And by the end, the reader will find, as she puts it in “The Return,” that, as an infant “exit[s] from the womb to life,” so the way of truth “Integrates its return with its beginning.”

*Note: all poems quoted in this essay can be found in A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems of Helen Pinkerton, 1945-2016, published by Wiseblood Books.

Mary Grace Mangano is a writer and educator whose poetry and writing have appeared in Dappled Things, Fare Forward, and America Magazine, among others. She currently teaches high school English in Philadelphia.