Robert Bly Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Alan Williamson

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. And he has a way of hectoring the reader (and quite possibly himself) into accepting his experience as visionary or profound—a tonality registered in his insistent exclamation points.

["This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years"] is culled from more than 16 years of work, but restricted, as he tells us in his introduction, to poems that record a personal experience of "two presences" or forms of consciousness—one his own, the other a larger, "impersonal" one, shared with plants and animals. So conscious and extra-literary a criterion can lead to an overly intellectual and doctrinaire religiosity; and indeed, when Mr. Bly writes of farmyard animals,

    Asleep they are bark fallen from an old cottonwood.
    Yet we know their soul...
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