Here I propose that the “deconstructive” discourse of Derrida, de Man et al—as well as the Nietzschean/Foucauldian discourse of power relations, Neo-Marxism and New Historicism—are essentially violent, destructive discourses grounded in images of agon, war. Rather, we need now to turn away from this end-of-century “darkness” toward regenerative models of poetic meaning which, like Freud’s “uncanny,” Levi-Strauss’ “mythomorphic” and Frye’s “great codes,” assert the mythopoetic core, the central human meaning (immanent-earthly if not transcendent-heavenly) of poetry. Indeed, our “pre-concepts”—the pre-reflexive, instinctive core meanings/understandings of poems, here illustrated via works by Ammons and Heaney—are presupposed by all the post-structuralist theories.

deconstructive, pre-concepts, discourses, mythopoetic, mythomorphic, great codes, uncanny, discourses, core meanings, regenerative