Robert Bly Summary

Bly, Robert (1926—) In the early 1990s, mention of the name "Robert Bly" conjured up primordial images of half-naked men gathered in forest settings to drum and chant in a mythic ... Read more

Robert Elwood Bly was born in Madison, Minnesota, and grew up on a farm nearby. After two years in the navy, he enrolled in Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and in the fall of 1947 transfe... Read more

Critical Essay by Howard Nelson [There] was a radical shift between [Robert Bly's] first and second books, Silence in the Snowy Fields and The Light Around the Body. Since then, however, Bly ha... Read more

Critical Essay by Michael Atkinson In Sleepers Joining Hands, Robert Bly offers his readers a various weave of the personal and the public, the psychological and the political modes of experience. Eac... Read more

Critical Essay by Hugh Kenner Robert Bly's prose poems have a parallel hallucinatory quality [to the drawings by Gendron Jensen that illustrate "This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwo... Read more

Critical Essay by Anthony Libby Bly is most explicitly [a] mystic of evolution, [a] poet of "the other world" always contained in present reality but now about to burst forth in a period... Read more

Critical Essay by Eliot Weinberger Robert Bly is a windbag, a sentimentalist, a slob in the language. Yet he is one of the half-dozen living American poets who are widely read, and of them, the one wh... Read more

Critical Essay by William V. Davis One of the key metaphors of [Light Around the Body], suggested in the title and alluded to in virtually every poem in the volume, is the metaphor which encompasses t... Read more

Critical Essay by Alan Williamson [As a poet] Mr. Bly has been limited by a relatively weak sense of the musical and connotative value of words; his poems often seem made of images and ideas alone. An... Read more

In the following review, Molesworth favorably compares the prose-poems of Bly's This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood with those of the poet's earlier collection, The Morning Glory... Read more

In the following essay, Molesworth studies Bly's This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood as a poetic challenge filled with “pastoral delight” and suffused with the religiosity... Read more

In the following review of This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years, Weinberger depicts Bly as a popular, influential, but ultimately “irrelevant” poet. Robert Bly is a windbag, a sen... Read more

In the following review, Stitt deems the collection This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years uneven, viewing it as further evidence of a duality in Bly's career that allows the “teach... Read more

In the following essay, Harris explicates Bly's poem “Walking Where the Plows Have Been Turning,” emphasizing its “feminine” principles of intuition, empathy, and in... Read more

In the following review of Silence in the Snowy Fields, Ray views Bly's poetry as a laconic, intense, and opinionated one that contrasts with the dominant mode of confessional verse and challen... Read more

In the following essay, Nelson describes the suggestive impact and quick, emotive brilliance of Bly's “tiny poems.”         ... Read more

In the following essay, Sugg examines Bly's early poetic mode, his use and conception of imagery, and his principal themes, particularly those of self-discovery and the development of the soul.... Read more

In the following essay, originally published in 1989, Kalaidjian probes Bly's subversive poetics—including his imagistic “repression of history” and his critique of America... Read more

In the following review of Eating the Honey of Words, the unsigned critic laments the lack of subtlety and development in Bly's poetry. Heeded in the '60s as the head apostle of the ... Read more

In the following review, Tromp acknowledges the wisdom and delicate simplicity of Bly's Morning Poems, calling them the best the poet has written. In imitation of the practice of his friend Wil... Read more

In the following review of The Night Abraham Called the Stars, the unsigned critic finds the verses of Bly's collection—inspired by Islamic religious poetry, the Bible, and great works o... Read more

In the following essay, Libby interprets Bly as a mystical poet, comparing the verses of the early collection Silence in the Snowy Fields with the more political poems of The Light Around the Body. Of... Read more

In the following review, Hall offers a series of observations on Bly's poetry and particularly on the final section of Sleepers Joining Hands, which he calls “the best of Bly's wo... Read more

In the following review of Sleepers Joining Hands, Helms judges Bly's forays into the Whitmanesque and the confessional mode of poetry to be lacking. The experience of reading Sleepers Joining ... Read more