Bly, Robert - Eliot Weinberger (review date 1979)

Eliot Weinberger (review date 1979)

SOURCE: Weinberger, Eliot. Review of This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years, by Robert Bly. Nation 229, no. 16 (17 November 1979): 503-04.

[In the following review of This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years, Weinberger depicts Bly as a popular, influential, but ultimately “irrelevant” poet.]

Robert Bly is a windbag, a sentimentalist, a slob in the language. yet he is one of the half-dozen living American poets who are widely read, and of them, the one whose work is most frequently imitated by fledgling poets and students of creative writing. His success, however, is less disheartening when considered as an emblem of an age—perhaps the first in human history—where poetry is a useless pleasantry, largely ignored by the reading public.

In every pre-industrial society, the poet has played an essential role as prophet, chronicler, social and political commentator,...

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