SOURCE: Libby, Anthony. “Robert Bly Alive in Darkness.” Iowa Review 3, no. 3 (summer 1972): 78-91.

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.

Often self-consciously, poetry now reassumes its ancient forms. When at Antioch College in the autumn of 1970 Robert Bly began a reading with an American Indian peyote chant, he seemed merely to be accepting a hip convention almost expected by an audience accustomed to Ginsberg and Snyder. Bly chanted for the usual reason, “to lower the consciousness down, until it gets into the stomach and into the chest and farther on.” But no such convention had existed in the early fifties, when Bly began to publish his intimations of physical transcendence poetry of the mystical body, and the conventional mystical terms that...