Robert Bly is an important figure in contemporary American poetry, but not because of the strength of his own poems. The position he occupies is rather like that occupied by Ezra Pound early in the century—one hears about Pound as an influence on the practice and careers of other poets much more often than one hears of Pound as a poet in his own right. And when one does look at Pound's work, the reason is clear: there is the brief, clear lyricism of Personae; the flirtation with Imagism and Vorticism: the dense modernism of the Mauberly period; and then the problem of the Cantos. It is a jittery body of work which doesn't quite hold together, the career of a didact and an inveterate experimenter. The case of Bly is similar; many speak of his influence on a whole generation of poets—from James Wright and Louis Simpson through writers like John Knoepfle to the later heirs like Kooser and Mark Vinz—but few actually speak of Bly's own poems. Again we find the same kind of jitteriness, the same didactic quality. His first book, and probably his best, Silence in the Snowy Fields, has the quiet beauty of a Minnesota wheat field in winter, which was precisely the point. Since then the poems have been mostly strident and didactic, slinging their arrows at a number of related targets.

Through it all, the figure of Bly as teacher, preacher, and reformer has dominated that of Bly as poet. The public donation of his National Book Award money to Resistance was an entirely typical gesture for Bly—and much of his poetry has been outwardly political, a result of his concern over the war in Vietnam. Bly has always tended to view the world in terms of dualities, polarities. Throughout his career he has argued, with an almost Messianic fervor, that there exists an opposition between what we might call a poetry of the Cartesian mind—logical, empirical, straightforward, business-like—and a poetry of the subconscious mind. Bly strongly feels that the former type of poetry is characteristic of the American literary tradition, just as Cartesian thought is typical of the American mind; thus his program of searching out and translating the work of exemplars of the latter type—Neruda, Jiminez, Hernandez, Vallejo, Trakl, etc. It is largely because of Bly's efforts in this direction that we have had a poetry of the “deep image” recently in America. Beyond this literary manifestation of the dualist view, Bly has also seen such oppositions in more general situations. At the time of Sleepers Joining Hands, for example, he expressed it in sexual terms. It was the insecurity of American masculinity that made us want to rape Vietnam; the feminine principle counseled sensitivity, respect for life, though it also embodied an intense desire to destroy, violently, rapacious masculinity. These forces fought it out in the poems as on the battlefields.

Elsewhere, Bly has referred to “some recent brain research” to prove that man has within him a reptile brain (which makes some of us violent, hostile, regressive), a mammalian brain (which makes others of us warm and loving) and an only rudimentarily developed higher consciousness (which might someday rule and harmonize these other two). Whatever the terms he has used at a given time (other versions were based on the work of Jung and Ortega y Gasset), one cannot quite shake the impression that all these theories are really but one theory, expressed at different times in different terms. With Emerson, Bly shares the desire to be the vatic bard who speaks great truths as though from on high. Consequently, he has always presented each new version of his truth as an entirely new truth—I once was lost, he seems to say every other week, but now am found; was blind but now I see. Which brings us to the preface—dualistically titled “The Two Presences”—of Bly's new book, This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years. His theory (which here is specifically a theory of poetry) says that, in addition to the human consciousness with which we have always been familiar, there is a “consciousness out there among plants and animals.” In recounting how this revelation came to him, Bly also defines the dominant mood of this other consciousness: “One day sitting depressed in a cabin on the shore of a small lake, I wrote about the depression:

Mist: no one on the other shore.
It may be that these trees
I see have consciousness,
and this desire to weep comes from them.

During the years since Silence in the Snowy Fields, Bly has written many poems in which he attempts to bring these two consciousnesses together, in balance and harmony. These are those poems.

Alas, the theory fails completely when used as a guide to what is actually happening in the poems themselves. The problem is not that Bly expresses no relationship between man's consciousness and that of nature in the poems—he does do this, and with something close to a vengeance. What we end up with, however, are not demonstrations of the separate existence of a nature consciousness but something like lessons to man based on the behavior of nature. For an example of this I am going to quote one of the worst stanzas in the entire book, from “The Fallen Tree”:

After a long walk I come down to the shore.
A cottonwood tree lies stretched out in the grass.
This tree knocked down by lightning—
and a hollow the owls made open now to the rain.
Disasters are all right, if they teach men and women
to turn their hollow places up.

This is what Bly means by the consciousness of nature; what I see, however, is a didactic spirit making use of nature to his own ends. This besides the breathtaking awfulness of the last two lines.

Elsewhere Bly's theory is manifested in his use of the pathetic fallacy, wherein the poet simply transfers his own emotions outward to nature, as in these lines from “Writing Again”: “When I write of moral things, / the clouds boil / blackly!” More commonly, and much more typically for Bly, the relationship is expressed through his favorite poetic device, the simile. “Listening to a Cricket in the Wainscoting” is composed entirely of a series of similes:

That sound of his is like a boat with black sails.
Or a widow under a redwood tree, warning
passersby that the tree is about to fall.
Or a bell made of black tin in a Mexican village.
Or the hair in the ear of a hundred-year-old man!

This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years is an uneven book, most seriously marred by its naïve preface; the reader who tries to understand the poems on the basis of Bly's theory is doomed to inevitable frustration. When the preface is ignored, however, it becomes apparent that there are many good poems here, poems not original in their vision or technique, but well-written and pleasurable for all of that. Among my favorites is “Moving Books to a New Study”:

First snow yesterday, and now more falling.
Each blade has its own snow balanced on it.
One mousetrack in the snow ahead,
the tailmark wavering in
between the footprints. Dusk in half an hour.
Looking up I see my parents' grove.
Somehow neither the Norwegian culture
nor the American could keep them warm.
I walk around the barn the long way
carrying the heavy green book I love through the snow.

We see that the son has solved for himself his parents' problem—the book he carries gives culture enough to keep him warm in the snow; indeed, he seems as much in his element as the mouse whose path parallels his. Robert Bly doesn't have to be correct: his is a stimulating and entertaining intellect, of the sort to keep us warm in even an upper-Midwestern winter.