or the artist’s world, from the art itself: The artist’s overriding goal, after all, is to integrate the two. He objects to what he considers the New Critics’ obsession with form. Bly himself is conscious of form changing form often, after lengthy deliberation and study, but views a concern with form as a natural function of the process of writing, rather than as the imposition of some preselected frame upon which one hangs one’s work to please the makers of canons.

Mostly, however, Bly has objected to the absolutely amoral position of New Criticism when it comes to evaluating literature in its historical context. Bly believes that literature (and literary criticism) has a responsibility to face its political implications, to argue politically charged issues, and ultimately to take a stand on those issues. His propensity to do just that has been perhaps his single greatest achievement for those poets who have come after him; they have almost uniformly confronted political issues, refusing to shy away from the dialogue of the present, and this is true largely because of Bly’s championing of the writer’s political obligations during the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Unwilling to take as his literary models the traditional form and language of English literature as it descended to him via the established canon, Bly has chosen to find his models from pre-Cartesian sources, such as fairy tales, Anglo-Saxon and Norse poetry, and poetry from other cultures, especially more primitive (that is, non-Western) cultures. What he has searched for in these works has been referred to as the “deep image” archetypal images that speak on a level beyond the cultural, beyond the superficial. Bly’s understanding of the deep image and its significance came from his reading of the philosopher Carl Jung, with his theory of a collective unconscious to which all humans have access via these mythic, archetypal images. Using such images as darkness, water, and death to represent experiences common to everyone, Bly attempts to write poetry that will ultimately heal, on the level of the psyche, Western society’s tendencies toward alienation and destruction that he finds so unnecessary. In his poem “Sleepers Joining Hands,” he writes of the healing power of poetry, using an archetypal image of optical illusion: “For we are like the branch bent in the water . . . / Taken out it is whole it was always whole.”

The Teeth Mother Naked at Last

First published: 1970 (also collected in Sleepers Joining Hands, 1973)

Type of work: Poem

Using surrealistic images of destruction and bits of political speeches, Bly angrily denounces the Vietnam War as a manifestation of the United States’ psychic disintegration.

Published separately in 1970, then later incorporated into Sleepers Joining Hands (1973), The Teeth Mother Naked at Last has been described as one of the best antiwar poems written in the twentieth century. Bly’s strategy in the composition of the poem was to undermine somehow the sterility of the language the United States used—both in its nightly news broadcasts and on its political lecterns—when discussing the Vietnam War and the issues surrounding it. He did this by revealing these familiar phrases and familiar political statements to be false.

After a series of descriptive images from the war in Indochina, descriptions which move from the striking—almost beautiful—to the increasingly bloody and grotesque, Bly tells his reader, “Don’t cry at that.” Would one cry at other natural phenomena, he asks, such as storms from Canada or the changing of the seasons? The language used publicly to discuss the war was similar to the language reserved for inevitable, natural things. Bly forces the reader to admit that fact by exposing the harsher reality of war.

The language Bly uses was drawn from many sources: the phrases of the military (“I don’t want to see anything moving. . . . [T]ake out as many structures as possible”); the standard phrases of columnists and television commentators; and the rhetoric of politicians, especially President Lyndon B. Johnson, whose Texas drawl Bly mimics by using hyphens. Then Bly, almost in a rage, warns that all such language conceals the truth. He catalogs those who lie, from the ministers to the reporters to the professors to the president, equating their willingness to lie with a kind of societal death wish. Bly sees in Americans’ capacity to kill, and to kill in such a sterile, casual way, a profound psychic rift, a demonstration of their own spiritual inadequacy.

The myth embodied in the title of the poem is also the myth by which Bly understood that spiritual poverty. The myth of the Great Mother, first discussed at length by Jung, and later by several prominent anthropologists including Claude Levi-Strauss, reveals the Western attempt to disavow the more feminine aspect of the psyche and embrace the masculine, that is, logical, instead.

In an essay titled “I Came Out of the Mother Naked,” which appears as a section of Sleepers Joining Hands—the section immediately after The Teeth Mother Naked at Last—Bly argues that the Great Mother, the embodiment of feminine consciousness in mythology, actually has four manifestations, which he lists as the Good Mother, the Death Mother, the Ecstatic Mother, and the Teeth Mother. He validates these aspects by taking examples from archaeology, mythology, and primitive poetry. The Good Mother is the image of the hearth, the one most familiar to the West; the Death Mother Bly describes as the mother figure responsible for evil and for evil witch and hag images; the Ecstatic Mother Bly equates with the muse of Greek literature, the feminine part of the consciousness that grants creativity; and the Teeth Mother, her opposite, is the aspect that destroys the spirit and forces people into a catatonic state, depriving them of the joy of life.

This aspect of the feminine had perhaps the most importance for Bly, because he saw in her image the spiritual bankruptcy of the American psyche—to him, the war in Vietnam revealed that, as a people, Americans had chosen the Teeth Mother over the Ecstatic Mother; they had chosen to destroy rather than create. Bly’s poem The Teeth Mother Naked at Last is perhaps the most remarkable antiwar poem of the Vietnam War era, precisely because it argues against the war on this most psychological, most fundamental level.

“Sleepers Jining Hands”

First published: 1973 (collected in Sleepers Joining Hands, 1973)

Type of work: Poem

Using autobiographical images, Bly embarks on a psychic journey into the darkness of his own consciousness to reveal the development of his inner personality.

“Sleepers Joining Hands,” the title poem of Bly’s 1973 collection, marks a departure from the type of poetry for which Bly had been known previously. His antiwar poetry, remarkable for his energetic, manipulative handling of the language of politics and political thought, had served as a training ground for the more mature, more personal poetry that distinguished this volume. Here language is used to uncover the truth of the psyche on a personal level. The use of Jungian psychology becomes more than a mere feature of the poetry; it becomes a central impetus—a tool for digging into the unconscious to discover the self.

The imagery of the poem is essentially autobiographical—recounting Bly’s days in New York reading poems by Rilke in solitude, recalling his relationship to his mother and his father, describing his life at home with his wife and children. To say that this poem is autobiographical is misleading, however, because the poem is not written in normative language but written instead in a crazy-quilt juxtaposition of images in a tone Bly calls psychic. The language in the poem is like the language of dreams—bits and pieces of memory alongside half-thoughts and inner, often unvoiced, fears.

The poem has been described by the critic Richard Sugg as an epic quest seeking selfhood, but to understand this quest, one must first turn to the ideas of Jung. Jung believed each personality was made of three features: the individual consciousness (experiences and memory, of which one is aware), the individual unconscious (experiences and memory one has suppressed or forgotten), and the collective unconscious (inherited, universal experiences and memories of ancestors that are passed down to each individual). Archetypes, or images which reveal or reflect the collective unconscious, function as indicators of that part of the personality that is most strong but usually inaccessible. Jung believed (as does Bly) that an individual who could integrate the three aspects of personality would obtain an enlightened state (Jung’s examples were Jesus Christ and Buddha) whereby his or her personality would be whole and intact.

It was this sort of integration Bly seeks in the lines of his poem, which uses images from his memory (consciousness); images from his dreams, fears, and unspoken feelings (unconscious); and archetypal images from mythology and religion (collective unconscious) to fuse the three into an overall understanding of the self. He often uses images of digging, of plunging down beneath the surface, of seeking the roots of the self. The journey takes place at night, and images of night prevail—owls, other nocturnal animals, and moonlight. It is a journey taken when one is in a dreamlike, unconscious state. What one finds at the end of the journey, at the core of the self, is communion with all other selves—full participation in the collective unconscious: One becomes the night creature, one becomes the archetypal image, one becomes a “sleeper,” joining hands with “all the sleepers in the world.”

Bly’s poem “Sleepers Joining Hands” attempts this participation in the collective unconscious. The poem, and the other poems in the volume, marks a new plateau for Bly’s achievement, not so much in form but in terms of poetic subject. Rather than seeking a more mature political voice, Bly turns his attention inward, writing what some critics have called psycho-spiritual poetry. Of this kind of poetry, which seeks to heal psychic wounds and regain the unconscious that has been lost, Bly has been recognized as an undisputed master.

“The Ant Mansion”

First published: 1975 (collected in The Morning Glory, 1975)

Type of work: Poem

Coming upon a piece of wood inhabited by ants, the poet speculates on the mystical and metaphoric significance of the objects of human labor.

“The Ant Mansion,” one of the longer prose poems included in Bly’s volume The Morning Glory (1975), contains a short narrative in which the poet, after waking in his sleeping bag, takes a walk through the forest. He comes upon a “wood chunk” that has started to decay, providing a home to a colony of ants. He takes the object home and, after studying it, begins to speculate on its significance as a metaphor for human existence.

This poem, as well as the entire collection The Morning Glory, was the culmination of a series of poems Bly began in the early 1970’s. After his psychological journeys in Sleepers Joining Hands, Bly began to experiment with the form he called the “prose poem,” a form the French poet Charles-Pierre Baudelaire claimed would be the major poetic form of the twentieth century. The prose poem offered Bly several new options, introducing new elements into his poetry. First, it introduced the element of plot—the poems became more narrative in nature. Second, the emphasis was not on the form at all but on the content—not on the language, but on the thought. Third, it allowed Bly the best medium in which to write what had been called, for lack of a better phrase, the “thing poem,” or the object poem.

In his essay “The Prose Poem as an Evolving Form” (1986), Bly points out that the main difference between usual poetic forms and the prose form is that the basic unit of the usual poem is the line. In the case of the prose poem, the basic unit is the sentence. According to Bly, the sentence allows the poem to proceed at a calmer, more relaxed pace; the prose poem establishes a more intimate, more natural, state for contemplation. According to Bly, the form’s closest antecedent—although it resembles the fable, the short story, and the essay—is the haiku. Like the haiku, the prose poem (or object poem) “is evidence that the poet has overcome, at least for the moment, the category-making mentality that sees everything in polarities: human and animal, inner and outer, spiritual and material, large and small.” The prose poem allows a kind of participation in nature that more structured poetry does not allow.

Bly begins “The Ant Mansion” by describing a dream in which the rubbing of his sleeping bag causes him to dream of being bitten by a rattlesnake. This wakes him, and he heads to the pasture, veering into some nearby woods. There he discovers the chunk of wood; he takes it back to his house, placing it on his desk. He begins to study the object, noting its many cavities, the color of each various shade of brown or black. He speaks of the wood as an apartment house for ants, speaking of the cavities as floors and the bark strips as roofs.

In the second half of the poem, Bly remarks that the “balconies” created by the half-decayed wood would make excellent “places for souls to sit” and begins to consider inviting all those souls he has known that are now dead to come and live in the ant mansion. He includes villagers he has known, his brother, his grandmother, and eventually such large masses as those who died in the Civil War. By the end of the poem, it becomes clear that the ant mansion has become a symbol for the objects of human labor, the fruit of human life on earth, which no one (or very few) is ever likely to see or use. Bly ends the poem thinking of his father’s labor and wishing that it, too, could be found by a pasture and somehow validated.

“Fifty Males Sitting Together”

First published: 1981 (collected in The Man in the Black Coat Turns, 1981)

Type of work: Poem

Employing dark, shadowy images, the poet descends into the psyche to unlock the mechanism that invigorates personality on the level of gender.

Bly’s poem “Fifty Males Sitting Together,” first published in The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), embodies a theme that occupied him throughout most of the 1980’s and beyond: the significance and inadequacies of being male in Western culture. In a preface to The Man in the Black Coat Turns, Bly claims that in its poems he had “fished in male waters, which [he] experienced as deep and cold but containing and nourishing some secret and moving life down below.” Bly’s concern with maleness stems from his anthropological study of the Great Mother. It is Bly’s contention that for the first forty thousand years or so of human existence, humans lived primarily in matriarchal cultures in which women retained the bulk of social, political, and religious power. These primitive cultures worshiped the Great Mother, symbol of the forces in nature and of life itself.

According to Bly, recorded history began when men began to fight against the Great Mother, asserting their superiority instead, the superiority of masculine thinking (logic and reason) over more natural (even more divine) patterns. This movement away from the Great Mother has left humans detached from nature, unsure of their strength, and intensely alone.

How this historical process manifests itself in modern life has preoccupied Bly since early in his career. He writes often of the male’s relationship to the father, writing of it in terms of frustration, incongruity, and disunity. His own relationship with his father had been nonexistent, remarked Bly during an interview with Bill Moyers for a 1988 Public Broadcasting Service documentary titled “A Gathering of Men,” until he realized—later on in life—that he had been involved in a sort of conspiracy with his mother to exclude his father. Once he realized this, he began a dialogue with his father that continued until his father’s death. The problem, according to Bly, was that older males have very few ways in which to initiate younger males into society. Initiation—the integrating of the younger generation into the mainstream of cultural life—has become so haphazard and arbitrary in modern society as to be nonfunctioning. Part of the purpose of the seminars and symposia Bly organized across the United States was to enlist older males to be initiators of their younger brethren; he also sought to encourage younger males to understand their shared dilemma.

In the poem “Fifty Males Sitting Together,” Bly describes a young male witnessing a ritual of descent—shadowy in nature—which takes place by a dark lake at night. Fifty males participate in the ritual, while the wives wait at home. Because he is of the woman’s world, and because the darkness of the masculine ritual frightens him, the young male cannot participate in the older males’ descent into the darker regions of the psyche; he “loses courage” and turns to nature instead. Using poetic irony, Bly refers to this turn as an ascent, but in the world of Bly’s imagery, ascent is a defeat—true self-awareness and knowledge can come only from the psychic descent. When the young man turns away, he moves far away from the world of men and feels cut off from them, alone. Yet in a last line, characteristic of Bly, the young man looks back and sees the night descending on the other shore, as if to say that even though he cannot participate, he is at least aware of what he needs to heal his wounded psyche.

Iron John

First published: 1990

Type of work: Essays

Bly uses a legend collected by the Grimm brothers as a means to structure the eight essays or chapters of his text to show the cultural importance of initiation and risk-taking in the lives of men.

In what is arguably his most culturally significant publication, Bly reprints a pre-Christian northern European folktale, “Iron John,” and addresses each and all of the major plot elements in the tale in chronological order over the course of eight chaptered essays, which is followed by an epilogue and then the entire text of the folktale. Bly uses the folktale to show how the fully developed, fully realized adult man is a combination of personae which can be identified at successive points in the tale.

Bly posits that the self-actualized adult male is in fact an entire community of beings—to be exact, seven distinct beings: King, Warrior, Lover, Wild Man, Trickster, Mythologist or Cook, and Grief Man. Bly criticizes the aspects of modern culture which do not allow for the adult male who has taken risks, been wounded, and even temporarily defeated. Bly argues that every man needs to engage in a personal journey of risk-taking and initiation. He argues that one of the problems of contemporary postindustrial culture lies in the fact that the father works but the son does not usually see him work or learn from his professional experiences and competencies. When the father arrives home in the evening barely in time for dinner, “his children receive only his temperament, and not his teaching,” and the temperament is likely to be problematic due to the technocratic daytime existence in which many fathers toil.

Bly uses the circumstances and conflicts of the folktale to delineate each of the beings that populate the fully realized adult male. The King figure initially represents the father figure, then a secondary tutelary figure after the protagonist leaves the original home. The various iterations of the King (Sacred King, Earthly King, Inner King) represent the will to power and the characteristics of the individual. The nobility of spirit is expressed in this being, though its potentiality can allow it to become the Poisoned King as easily as the Sacred King. Just so, the Sacred Warrior has a blessed side and a poisoned side, a Constructive Warrior and a Destructive Brutal Warrior. Just as modern bifurcated life has truncated and attenuated the impact of the father, so the ancient Sacred Warrior has often in modern times disintegrated into the mindless soldier, a casualty of mechanized warfare, from Bly’s perspective. Bly is troubled by the ways that he sees contemporary society encouraging warriorhood among women, while discouraging the very same elements in boys and men. Respecting one’s inner warrior is one of the ways that a man comes into a better understanding of the weighty forces involved in making and maintaining human relationships.

Bly identifies the lack of consistent, widespread, cultural initiation by older men and ritual elders in Western society. He emphasizes the importance of developing the Lover, a central element in maintaining what Bly calls one’s “garden.” Connected to the controlling metaphor of the Wild Man is his representation of the positive side of male sexuality; the Wild Man is the male protector of the earth, and his qualities of spontaneity, association with wilderness, honoring of grief, and respect for risk represent elements that Bly considers essential to the fully developed contemporary man. The Trickster, common in North American Indian folklore, provides counterpoint, irony, and insight, his very existence a critique of norms and complacencies. The Mythologist or Cook determines how long “cooking” should continue and the timing between stages or beings. Finally, the seventh being is the Grief Man; Bly emphasizes the value of being able to grieve deeply, to suffer a wound and always to remember it yet to recover from it. Bly investigates the Greek notion of Katabasis, the “Drop” involving the notion of disaster or extreme reversal of fortune towards the negative. Bly realizes that “A wound allows the spirit or soul to enter,” and he seeks to facilitate the process of renewal and insight through loss. In articulating the seven beings of the ideal contemporary man, Bly throws down the gauntlet in creating a new courtier’s handbook for the millennial male.