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 whose work is most frequently imitated by fledgling poets and students of creative writing. His success, however, is less disheartening when considered as an emblem of an age—perhaps the first in human history—where poetry is a useless pleasantry, largely ignored by the reading public. (p. 503)

Bly sees his mission as the restoration of the "feminine" to American poetry. (At his many public readings, he still stomps around the stage in a rubber L.B.J. mask, to symbolize "masculine"—which he believes is destructive—energy.) He has dismissed most of the North American masters (Pound, Williams, Eliot, et al.) and has publicly knelt and kissed the hand of Pablo Neruda, his muse and role model...