Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter Historical Context

Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter Historical Context

The Early 1960s

When Bly published this poem in the early 1960s, a number of poets were using what poetcritic Robert Kelley in 1961 called the "deep image." Kelley used this term to describe a type of image that could fuse the experience of the poet's inner self and his outer world. Bly had been experimenting with this image in the late 1950s in poems he wrote for various journals and magazines. During his Fulbright year in Norway in 1956-1957, Bly began reading European and Latin American surrealist poets such as Georg Trakl, Pablo Neruda, and Caesar Vallejo, and he quickly embraced their use of the image to probe the unconscious mind. His translation of their work in his and William Duffy's literary magazine, The Fifties—renamed The Sixties and The Seventies in subsequent decades—helped introduce these poets to American readers. Bly considered these writers practitioners of the "new imagination" and their use...
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