“The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World” is a large poem that addresses large themes. Kinnell is attempting to do for twentieth century New York what T. S. Eliot did for London in The Waste Land (1922), what Guillaume Apollinaire did for Paris in “Zone,” and what Walt Whitman accomplished for nineteenth century America in Leaves of Grass (1855). By concentrating on a small area of a single city, Kinnell is trying to make a statement about the new world as a whole, and perhaps all of creation.
All of the characters in the poem seem to be suffering from one malady or another. They are all transplants, either from Africa, Puerto Rico, or Jewish ghettos in Europe, and they are not surviving terribly well in this new world. Fathers are removed from sons, and old men and women are headed toward death. The creative power of sex is not felt anywhere in the poem; Whitman’s “procreant urge” has been replaced by the sounds of despair, the “oi weih” of the poem’s close. Although in the early part of the poem God’s presence alleviated some suffering, especially in sections 2 and 4 in which the old Jewish man and woman see God in the sky, by the end of the poem, God is only a “held breath,” the Avenue bearing the initial of Christ is “God-forsaken,” and a fishmonger who lops off fish heads and nails the fish to wood “stands like Christ” in the new world.
The fault does not lie in...
(The entire section is 432 words.)