Robert bly bly robert vol 5 essay

It was called Poems for the Ascension of J. P. Morgan, and failed to find a publisher. (A few of these poems would turn up in Silence in the Snowy Fields and The Light Around the Body, Bly’s second published book, which appeared in 1967). Bly remained undeterred in his sense of poetic mission.

Bly’s dissatisfaction with the poems of The Lute of Three Loudnesses —“I heard a whisper of Milton,” writes Bly in the Selected Poems, and “something in it didn’t fit me”—led to a period of self-imposed isolation in New York City and Cambridge from 1951 to 1954.

The poetry of Robert Bly probably evokes the phrase “deep image” for most readers. Deep images are supposed to tap unconscious sources of energy, and the poetry that uses them is thought to give only a sketchy account of the phenomenal world.

True free-associational surrealism, which is what Bly has long advocated for poetry, is achieved by turning inward, “into” the body and away from the “head” and the world. It is therefore hardly surprising that the only criterion of quality for this poetry of “weird” and “deep images” is said to be its resistance to analysis.