"Henry Corbin & American Poetry"

Tom Cheetham recently wrote on Robert Duncan's interest in Persian scholar Henry Corbin. It's great to see a web space devoted to Corbin's work which, via Olson and Duncan, helped influence the projective aims of Black Mountain. I've always found Corbin's scholarship helpful in articulating how thought and perception can be precisely valued--and that the history of how we think and feel has roots in competing traditions of thought and bodies of spiritual feeling. It's been a while since I've read Corbin, but Cheetham links to an article I wrote several years ago that discusses how the New Americans applied some of Corbin's study to their own pursuits. Here's a snippet:

Persian scholar Henry Corbin wrote extensively on the active intelligence of Medieval Islamic philosophy and spiritual practice, particularly in Avicenna and the Visionary Recital. In Arabic it's 'aql fa''al, the Tenth Intelligence, uniting light and darkness, matter and language. In that sense it's part of a complex medieval angelology, a system of reading signs and their spiritual correspondences. For Duncan, Charles Olson and others it has to do with the activation of language in the self, a kind of self-actualization by the word. An active intelligence in poetry is one that quickly apprehends the relations of things, ideas and emotions without explaining or playing games with words. It's a unifying intelligence that does not rest, abiding by an intuitive curiosity. There are emotional and instinctive intelligences, physical ones too (like Newton's law of gravity!). But the active intelligence is engaged with the reading of images and the mediation between self and other through them. Related to it is ta'wil, a spiritual or esoteric exegesis that turns thought back on its origin in language and the world.