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 ...
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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...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Julian Gitzen
Robert Bly's poetry owes its appeal in part to vivid descriptions of the region around Madison, Minnesota, where he has spent much of his life. The chief concern...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Alan Helms
The experience of reading Sleepers Joining Hands … is a bit like slogging your way through a violent storm.
The book begins in deceptive calm, with "Six Wint...
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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...
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Critical Essay by James Finn Cotter
Nowadays, everything Bly touches becomes a holy cause and reason for another book. [In This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood] he consecrates "the often...
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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...
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Critical Essay by William V. Davis
Robert Bly has suggested that the prose poem surfaces in situations when the culture of a period is moving dangerously close to abstraction. It is almost as if the p...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Charles Molesworth
Bly has touched and often irritated virtually every poet and every issue in contemporary poetry in at least one of his roles: editor, satirist, theorizer, organize...
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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...
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Critical Essay by Hayden Carruth
[Robert Bly is a] poet I don't believe and never have. He explains in the preface to his new book, This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years, that he is aware...
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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...
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In the following excerpted review of Silence in the Snowy Fields, Mills comments on the aim and style of Bly's poetry, seeing the work as a collection of purified and “concentrated under...
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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...
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In the following interview, Dodd and Bly discuss the “domestication” and homogenization of contemporary American poetry.
[Dodd:] I see a curious contradiction in contemporary poetry. On ...
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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...
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In the following review, Dacey characterizes This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood as “a book of deep religious longings,” concentrating on the various qualities of Bly's po...
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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...
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In the following essay, Davis explores Bly's representation of political themes via the metaphor of light and darkness in his collection The Light Around the Body.
In the same year that he wrot...
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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...
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In the following essay, Zavatsky addresses a number of theoretical problems in Bly's work in relation to the poet's thoughts on narrative, the feminine, confession, and other significant...
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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...
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In the following excerpted review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns, Perloff observes the autobiographical and inward-looking qualities of the collection, and comments on Bly's translation of ...
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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...
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In the following review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns, Molesworth commends the work's structural variety and unity of persistent themes.
Robert Bly's new book of poems [The Man in t...
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In the following review of Selected Poems, Stitt remarks on Bly's poetic journeys through natural, human, and spiritual worlds, his use of daring metaphors, and his allegiance to “the da...
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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....
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In the following excerpt, Davis offers an overview of the poems in Silence in the Snowy Fields and This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years, comparing the collections structurally and thematically,...
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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...
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In the following excerpt, Davis summarizes critical reaction to Bly's The Man in the Black Coat Turns and Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, works he associates with the poet's exploration of...
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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 ...
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In the following essay, Hansen explicates the allusions and imagery of Bly's poem of otherworldly communion, “Surprised by Evening.”
Robert Bly's book Eating the Honey of W...
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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...
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In the following excerpted review, Friedman compares Bly's Silence in the Snowy Fields with the work of contemporary, experimental poets and observes the energetic, restless nature of Bly...
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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...
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In the following excerpted review of The Light Around the Body, Leibowitz considers Bly a failed political poet.
Who, in the midst of the awful, lunatic events of our times, has written political poet...
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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...
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In the following review of Sleepers Joining Hands, Oates praises Bly's “powerful,” “unified,” and prophetic collection.
[Sleepers Joining Hands] is a remarkable coll...
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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...
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In the following essay, Molesworth surveys Bly's poetic style, ideas, influences, political poetry, pastorals, prose-poems, and finally his long, visionary work Sleepers Joining Hands.
I
Since ...
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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 ...
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Brilliance with a Pen
Robert Bly has published a substantial amount of impressive works of literature. He is accomplished in many other hobbies, as well as poetry. As a distinguished writer Bly rem...
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Bly, Robert (1926—)
Robert (Elwood) Bly
