Bly, Robert - Charles Molesworth (essay date 1978)

Charles Molesworth (essay date 1978)

SOURCE: Molesworth, Charles. “Domesticating the Sublime in Bly's Latest Poems.” Ohio Review 19, no. 3 (fall 1978): 56-66.

[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 that Bly confers on bodies and bodily sensation.]

For more than fifteen years now, Robert Bly has been an unignorable presence in American poetry. In some ways his career has been marked by one peak after another. The sudden impact of his first book, the protest speech at the National Book Awards dinner in March, 1968, the polemics of the Sixties magazine, the “discovery” of South American poetry, the theoretical essays on the deep image: each facet of his engagement with poetry in our time was cut with energy and high seriousness, and often both together. Assuming Bly would ever...

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