Criticism > Poetry > Bly, Robert - William V. Davis (essay date 1979-1980)

Bly, Robert - William V. Davis (essay date 1979-1980)

William V. Davis (essay date 1979-1980)

SOURCE: Davis, William V. “Hair in a Baboon's Ear: The Politics of Robert Bly's Early Poetry.” Carleton Miscellany 18, no. 1 (winter 1979-1980): 74-84.

[In the following essay, Davis explores Bly's representation of political themes via the metaphor of light and darkness in his collection The Light Around the Body.]

In the same year that he wrote his powerful poem “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War,” Wallace Stevens wrote a prose statement on the poetry of war in which he tried to reconcile the seemingly disparate tendencies which afflict a man of conscience, who is also a poet, during a time of war:

The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things. In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination. And consciousness of an immense war is a consciousness of fact. If that is...

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