Bly, Robert - David Ray (review date 1963)

David Ray (review date 1963)

SOURCE: Ray, David. Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields, by Robert Bly. Epoch 12, no. 3 (winter 1963): 186-88.

[In the following review of Silence in the Snowy Fields, Ray views Bly's poetry as a laconic, intense, and opinionated one that contrasts with the dominant mode of confessional verse and challenges readers' notions of reality.]

Robert Bly is one of the leading figures today in a revolt against rhetoric—a rebellion that is a taking up of the Imagist revolution betrayed, a reassertion of much of the good sense Pound brought to poetry—but also a movement which has in it much that is perfectly new. The new is found in a pure form in the work of Robert Bly [in Silence in the Snowy Fields] and of his friend James Wright; it is not an easy aesthetic to describe; it can be found only in a response to their poems. And yet the key might lie in Bly's admiration for the quality of...

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