Bly, Robert - Herbert Leibowitz (review date 1968)

Herbert Leibowitz (review date 1968)

SOURCE: Leibowitz, Herbert. Review of The Light Around the Body, by Robert Bly. Hudson Review 21, no. 3 (autumn 1968): 553-63.

[In the following excerpted review of The Light Around the Body, Leibowitz considers Bly a failed political poet.]

Who, in the midst of the awful, lunatic events of our times, has written political poetry that stands a chance of surviving both as effective political statement and great art? Neruda, certainly; Mayakovsky, Pasternak, and Voznesensky, among other Russian poets. American poets are conspicuously missing from any list we might draw up, for though a poetry of protest can be traced back at least as far as Whittier, who sought to rouse the conscience of America over the slavery issue, American poets have tended to avoid poetical comment on political issues, preferring to write about their domestic joys and strife, the domain of the inner man, keeping an...

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