William Morris, according to Yeats, once said that “somebody should have been beside Carlyle and punched his head every five minutes.” Surely the same can be said of Robert Bly, provided the frequency is increased. The following true story illustrates the frustrating vagaries of trying to come to terms with his work: six young writers are riding home from a Bly reading in New York; all but one are eulogizing it with great verve. The sixth, an accomplished poet from the South, remains conspicuously silent until he can stand no more of it and launches an attack on Bly. The other writers are palpably stunned by this heresy, but in a short while each in turn reveals his or her heretofore secret reservations about Bly. The mood changes to one of deep disappointment and a brooding quiet settles over the group. Finally, one of the writers, a female, says, “Yeah, but I'd still like to fuck him.” The progress of this group-response to Bly is positively Hegelian, and typical of countless readers' responses. As thesis there is rapture; as antithesis, distance and disillusionment. Synthesis entails a return to Bly, as if because of some residue from the earlier rapture, but a return free of any illusions: not love-making but fucking. Indeed, the head-knocking à la Morris and the fucking of the young woman off-rhyme suggestively: both perhaps are a kind of affectionate banging.

Bly's This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood, a collection of prose poems, is emphatically a book of deep religious longing. The focus throughout on the body is the function not of materialism or hedonism but of a Romantic trust that the body, with its instincts and its close relationship to the earth, provides the surest counsel to spiritual pilgrims:

Each step we take in conversation with our friends, moving slowly or flying, the body watches us, calling us into what is possible, into what is not said, into the shuckheap of ruined arrowheads, or the old man with two fingers gone.

(“Falling into Holes in Our Sentences”)

More than a third of the twenty poems begin with the clause, “My friend, this body is made of …,” or some variation of it. This reliance on the body is another form of Bly's exhortation years ago that “American poetry needs more animals in it.” No Walt Disneyite, Bly felt American poetry was floating, insufficiently chthonic, aridly lacking in irrational content. Pope's “Art of Sinking in Poetry” may be a fine joke, but Bly seriously wants to sink in his poetry—into his own body, the body of his language, and the body of the world in which he finds himself. In fact, the prose poem is meant to heal “the wound of abstraction” that, according to Bly, is attributable to a founding father of Western culture. In a recent interview, [Boundary 2, Spring 1976, pp. 677-700] Bly elaborates his theory: “Aristotle caused a wound and the Grail legends talk about it; now no work is of any value that does not face the wound. … The Middle Ages centered around Aristotle, the whole mentality that led to the Ph.D. as well as to secularism. … The Grail legends describe the wound made by the Catholic Church that foolishly adopted Aristotle.” Bly's new book means to “face the wound,” to combat secularism. Thus it has both a prophetic quality that distinguishes it from most contemporary work and a grandiose purpose bordering on battiness. Nevertheless, as a descendant of all those who opposed the dualistic heresy of Manichaeism, which proclaimed the evil of the body, of, indeed, all matter, Bly struggles with his own Lutheran heritage, as well as with American puritanism more generally. In response to a question about his ties to Asian thought, Bly once said, “Don't forget I'm not a Sufi; I'm a Norwegian Lutheran.”

Paul Tillich has isolated a “strongly transcendent idea of the Kingdom of God” as a definite component of Lutheranism, whereas Bly, as if in direct rebuttal to Tillich, has written (in The Light Around the Body, 1967) that “The Kingdom of Heaven does not mean the next life … / The two worlds are both in this world.” Here is an entire poem from the new book, “Galloping Horses,” which transforms these various strands into a brief narrative:

The horses gallop east, over the steppes, each with its rider, hard. Each rider carries a strip of red cloth raised above his head. The horses leap over a line of fire. Then a stream, they leap higher, hooves push into the mud. Then a crevice—space stretched out sideways—a few horses fall in. Now they meet their fourth obstacle—flesh. … It is a Garden, elephant trunks reach lazily up into tree branches, and the gazelles hurry over the plain like blood corpuscles in a storm, flock on flock, even the monkeys have hair. And the horses slow, they become confused among so many gentle animals, the riders look to the side and behind them, turning in their saddles to see the large animals peacefully grazing behind.

This is Bly's version of the Peaceable Kingdom. The flesh is a Garden. The Garden, in fact, the details suggest. The horses gallop East, reversing time, back to origins, a past that is still present, at least in potentia, in the human body, that body out of which this dream that is the poem arises. Hardly disguised here is Bly's calculated use of the ancient elements: the horses leap over fire, water, and air, in that order, but then are unable to leap over the fourth, earth, in the form of flesh. That stops them, like a great and powerful truth that will, no, shall be recognized. The poem just before it in the book, “Going Out to Check the Ewes,” ends: “This body longs for itself far out at sea, it floats in the black heavens, it is a brilliant being, locked in the prison of human dullness.” The object, then, of the book's religious longing is, quite simply, the human body, which, for Bly, is ultimately inseparable from the body of Creation and which has been lost—in part because of the development of human consciousness—but allures with the promise of recovery.

Also dramatized in “Galloping Horses” is Bly's heavily worked theory of ostensibly opposing sexual principles that derives from Jung, with his animus and anima, and the Tao Te Ching, with its yin and yang. In Bly's universe, the rider/horse gestalt is masculine—violent and potentially oppressive, repressive—while the Garden's constituency is feminine—gentle, loving, peaceful. The horses, who, with the riders, have been so purposeful and linear, experience confusion among these representatives of a way of life oriented more toward being than becoming.

But such fullness as that of the Garden body is exceptional, whereas deprivation is not, as the title of the very next poem suggests. “A Dream of What Is Missing” contains this quintessential Bly passage: “In the dream, I saw the lumps of dirt that heal the humpbacked, what rolls slowly upward from the water.” Years before, in “Come With Me,” Bly had expressed compassion for “Black and collapsed bodies, that tried and burst, / And were left behind,” inner tubes and not. He is a poet of despair and of longing for deliverance from it. The deliverance will come, he cannot help believing, from “lumps of dirt,” out of which, naturally, a body can be made, and from the female water, which for Bly is virtually synonymous with unconscious, instinctual life, an amniotic home. The dirt and water combined suggest mud, which, in a Bly poem, is a nearly talismanic substance. From the first, in Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962), Bly loved mud: the “spider-colored” crow of “Where We Must Look for Help,” the crow released from the ark, would find “new mud to walk upon.” The mud is both a sign of devastation and a promise of renewal. In “Galloping Horses,” the hooves “push into the mud.” The effect is that of masculine brutalization of yielding feminine form. Finally, then, “upward” is the key word in the quotation from “A Dream of What Is Missing”: saving grace not from on high, from a transcendent absolute, but from Bly's version of the “foul rag-and-bone-shop of the heart.”

In a recent, rare autobiographical essay [“Being a Lutheran Boy-God in Minnesota,” Growing Up in Minnesota, ed. Chester Anderson (University of Minnesota Press, 1976)], Bly confesses that as a child he was a boy-god. What he means by that term is crucial to an understanding of his work generally and this new book in particular:

[Boy-gods] are boys, and yet they feel somehow eternal, out of the stream of life, they float above it. … If someone were suffering, or in a rage, I would feel myself pull away, into some safe area, where I did not “descend” to those emotions. … The mood of Lutheran Sunday School only speeded up that tendency. It taught us that the body—that is, woman—was evil, and that purity lay in the eternal, in what was “up”. … “I will leave you” is the everlasting cry of the boy-god. He wants to be tied down to no one, especially not to a woman.

When Bly writes in “Walking Swiftly,” the book's first poem, that “the heat inside the human body grows, it does not know where to throw itself—for a while it knots into will, heavy, burning, sweet, then into generosity, that longs to take on the burdens of others, then into mad love that lasts forever,” the reader fresh from the boy-god essay cannot help taking this as a disguised summary autobiography. Likewise, a claim like “our bodies are equal to the snow in energy” (“Snowed In”) seems to become, in the light of his past boy-godism (how past is it?), a kind of triumphant perception, a stage in a fairly desperate struggle with forces both psychological and cultural. In “The Sleeper,” an unidentified “he … came to me and began to play music. One arm lay outside the covers. He put the dulcimer in my hand but I did not play it. Why didn't I wake up? And why didn't I play? Because I am asleep, and the sleeping man is all withdrawn into himself.” That sleeping, withdrawn man represents the plight of the boy-god, who needs to be awakened from a state of emotional detachment. Thus Bly's fight during the years of the recent Asian war to waken his people from a sleep of their sympathies was also apparently a fight, though not conspicuously so, for self-awakening. The religious nature of that need for awakening is suggested by the likely interpretation of the “he” in “The Sleeper” as the same “someone” in the three-line “Listening to Bach,” from Sleepers Joining Hands (1973): “There is someone inside this music / who is not well described by the names / of Jesus, Jehovah, or the Lord of Hosts!” Not well described, but described.

Bly's boy-god is close kin to the “fallen man” of Jacob Boehme, the “Teutonic Theosopher,” who has supplied Bly with numerous epigraphs, certain attitudes (for example, Boehme's claim, made almost four hundred years ago, that “in a quarter of an hour [spent meditating] I understood more than if I had been many years at a university,” bears an uncanny resemblance to Bly's baiting of his college audiences), and, more importantly, an entire moral framework in which to situate himself. But Bly has given to Boehme's ideas a torque owing much to modern depth psychology. For one thing, whereas “light” was Boehme's term of highest commendation, Bly's is “dark,” and, for another, Bly's fallen man has fallen not into sexuality but from it and must, to be saved, fall into it again. “When the Wheel Does Not Move” begins:

There is a dense energy that pools in the abdomen and wants to move and does not! It lies there fierce and nomadic, blocking the road, preventing anyone else from going by. When the sperm wants to move and does not, then it is as if the earth were not made for me at all, and I cannot walk with the cricket voyaging over this Gobi of wood chips; he is too free for me. I hear a howling in the air.

All the negatives in the passage are the signature of the repression Bly takes as his subject. The cricket surpasses the poet because it, like a blossom in “Snowed In,” is “living at a level of instinct surer than mine.” Although the “howling in the air” is presumably meant to be the animal and spiritual suffering caused by the ungenerous repression (“generous” and “genitals” have the same linguistic root), it ought to be the raucous laughter at the idea that a cricket has any kind of freedom worth the name.

Still, envy of crickets is what one comes to expect from Bly. In his introduction to The Morning Glory, his previous book of prose poems (1975), Bly claimed that a pine tree has a moral life and suggested in a poem that spiritual salvation will be forthcoming “if we agree to put ourselves in the hands of the ants.” Not surprisingly, one of Bly's favorite Whitman poems is “I think I could turn and live with animals.” Michael Lynch's phrase in reference to Michael McClure, “hip zoological primitivism,” applies to Bly as well. When, in Gopherwood, Bly writes with a straight face that “the cabbages love the earth,” he abuses the Romantic tradition, cheapens it, and turns it into the kind of commodity that, in its marketability, proves Barnum right. Bly seems incapable of assenting, in any of his moods, to a passage such as this one, from The Prelude: “we shall still / Find solace—knowing … how the mind of man becomes / A thousand times more beautiful than the earth / On which he dwells.” And, although he admires Stevens, Bly counters Stevens' “we live in a place / That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves” with “these cucumber leaves are my body.” At such times Bly sounds more like a purveyor of snake-oil than a poet.

So much for some of the ideas, values, biases, and plain cant that populate Bly's poems. What of his means? (Technique is, of course, a dirty word to Bly.) Leaping has been for a long time Bly's favorite modus operandi. In brief, leaping is a movement “from one world to another,” a shuttling between the unconscious and the conscious. He calls that movement “an ancient freedom,” seeks to embody it in all his work, and goes so far as to say that the “farther a poem gets from its initial worldly circumstance without breaking the thread, the more content it has.” Bly flatly opposes the “old banal American realism.” What this means in practice is that “Going Out to Check the Ewes” can have almost nothing to do with ewes, even though Bly contends that the prose poem serves to foster close observation of the physical world. It also means that Bly feels free to end a poem like so:

We talk all morning of the confusion of others, and in daylight the car slides off the road, I give advice in public as if I were adult, that night in a dream I see a policeman holding a gun to the head of a frightened girl, who is blindfolded, we console each other, and opening a National Geographic see an old woman lying with her mouth open.

(“Falling into Holes in Our Sentences”)

The context does not readily clarify that paragraph, as virtually none of its elements occur previously in the poem. The line between leaping and incoherence is one Bly constantly needs to re-draw. His aesthetic problem may be rooted in Jung's idea that the contents of the unconscious undergo important changes when they enter into consciousness. If it follows from that idea that the unconscious and its ways cannot be conscripted into consciousness, then Bly's wish to wed his poems to the unconscious as intimately as he does is basically wrong-headed, a grand but misguided, ultimately anti-literary and self-defeating venture.

Two further ironies in the face of such a passage as the one just quoted declare themselves: 1) although Bly rails against the academic/classroom mill, such writing (or the entirety of “How the Ant Takes Part”) is perfect grist for that mill, and 2) although Bly, a classic literary demagogue, rails against artifice in poetry (“sonnets are where old professors go to die,” he once said, and his advice to a student to shun iambics because his work was abstract makes absolutely no sense at all), many of the prose poems in this book are more artificial—pieces clearly contrived in a language one is not likely to hear outside the poem—than virtually any of, say, Frost's poems in blank verse. Frost and countless others achieve the natural or a semblance of it through the artificial; Bly wishes to bypass the latter and ends up smack in the middle of it. Nor do the ironies end there. The prose poem is written, says Bly, to suggest “a man or woman talking not before a crowd, but in a low voice to someone he is sure is listening.” “Walking to the Next Farm” climaxes as follows:

Then what is asked of us? To stop sacrificing one energy for another. They are not different energies anyway, not “male” or “female,” but whirls of different speeds as they revolve. We must learn to worship both, and give up the idea of one god.

The voice here is loud and coming from a pulpit. Bly's evangelism subverts his art. Nor does such lofty moralizing serve the purpose of healing “the wound of abstraction.” Generally, Bly's comments on the aesthetics of the prose poem seem flashier, less thoughtful, and more self-serving than either Russell Edson's (in Parnassus, Fall/Winter 1976) or Michael Benedikt's (introducing his prose poem anthology).

Perhaps his only half-hearted interest in the poem as literary artifact allows Bly to compose (or decompose) as mawkishly as in this passage from “Coming in for Supper”: “How amazed I am, after working hard in the afternoon, that when I sit down at the table, with my elbows touching the elbows of my children, so much love flows out and around in circles.” Christopher Ricks has said that “the exclamatory is the enemy of the true exclamation”; Bly seems unable to grasp that truth. The book ends with these paragraphs:

I first met you when I had been alone for nine days, and now my lonely hawk body longs to be with you, whom it remembers … it knew how close we are, we would always be. There is death but also this closeness, this joy when the bee rises into the air above his hive to find the sun, to become the son, and the traveler moves through exile and loss, through murkiness and failure, to touch the earth again of his own kingdom and kiss the ground …

What shall I say of this? I say, praise to the first man who wrote down this joy clearly, for we cannot remain in love with what we cannot name. …

Although the last causal clause shows good sense contrary to Bly's usual position vis-à-vis ants and crickets, Bly has never written so poorly—so sentimentally, so falsely, as if he were cynically drafting a script for a Hollywood soundtrack. All this joy and love and longing and kissing and touching and praise practically swamp the page in sticky ooze. The coarseness of such a passage is particularly regrettable when viewed against the fine effects Bly is capable of elsewhere. The following comes from “Snowed In”:

The blossom faces the window where snow sweeps past at forty miles an hour … So there are two tendernesses looking at each other, two oceans living at a level of instinct surer than mine … yet in them both there is the same receiving, the longing to be blown, to be shaken, to circle slowly upward, or sink down toward roots … one cold, one warm, but neither wants to go up geometrically floor after floor, even to hold up a wild-haired roof, with copper dragons, through whose tough nose rain water will pour. …

So the snow and the orangey blossoms are both the same flow, that starts out close to the soil, close to the floor, and needs no commandments, no civilization, no drawing rooms lifted on the labor of the claw hammer, but is at home when one or two are present, it is also inside the block of wood, and in the burnt bone that sketched the elk by smoky light.

This is marred by, among other things, nonsense (blossoms and snows do not long for anything), by the glib dismissal of civilization and its works in favor of raw nature, and by that kneejerk Romantic tendency to merge, merge, merge (“both the same flow”); but as sustained and pointed, richly embodied rhapsody, the passage is superb.

Although Bly, who's famous for his tin ear, says he's begun composing lately with particular attention to vowel-sounds, these poems don't noticeably demonstrate any new musicality. The sounds are not mishandled, but neither do they contribute much; images, ideas, manipulation of syntax, associative logic—these carry most of the weight. Perhaps at the end of “Finding the Father” we get a glimpse of Bly's new direction: “He sits there behind the door … the eyebrows so heavy, the forehead so light … lonely in his whole body, waiting for you.” The succession of long vowels quite effectively emphasizes, like trumpet sonorities, the importance of Bly's “Father,” who seems kin to the musician in “The Sleeper”. But it's unlikely that Bly's devotion to his own opinions or convictions will allow him to do more than paste on a few such effects. What's especially odd, though, about his new interest in the aural quality of poetry is that Bly remains the master of the cheap shot at traditional poets who have themselves mastered the element of sound. Tennyson, for example, whom Bly fliply dismisses, could teach Bly more about sound than he could ever possibly use. One remembers Allen Tate's words: “a historic way for a writer of modest talent to call attention to himself is to attack his elders and betters. Bly has been doing that for years.” At recent readings, Bly talks as though he is the first (or maybe the second, after Yeats) to discover the importance of sound in poetry. If he's not careful, he just might soon discover the sonnet.

Unlike most books of poetry these days, Gopherwood contains illustrations, gorgeously detailed ones, in pencil, of a single snail-shell in a sequential variety of positions. In fact, when the pages of the book are steadily flipped, the shell can be seen slowly turning itself over. Poems-cum-movie! The excellent artist is Gendron Jensen, who is described rather preciously on the dust jacket as a “forest eccentric”—not so eccentric, please note, as to prevent him from singing a contract with Harper & Row.

The Loon is a booklet of fourteen short poems (three or four lines each) modest in tone and light in touch. Bly once wrote that “American haiku poets don't grasp the idea that the shadow has to have risen up and invaded the haiku poem, otherwise it is not a haiku. The least important thing about it is its seventeen syllables or the nature scene.” This small collection represents another chapter in the story of the Americanization of the haiku, even though the poems are less shadowed than Bly's theory would lead a reader to expect. One poem, “Kabekona Lake,” can perhaps serve to indicate the humor, tact, and charm of the book as a whole:

Lots of men could sleep
on those fir branches
swaying near the widow's house!

The poem has deep feeling but that feeling has been modulated, bent, in such a way as to keep it from calling attention to itself. The strategy is not Bly's usual. Indeed, the contrast between Gopherwood and The Loon is remarkable: the former is intense, driving, obsessed; the latter is relaxed, quiet, reserved. Here, rather than in his prose poems, Bly seems to be talking “in a low voice to someone he is sure is listening.” Louis Simpson once said of Bly that he is “one of the few poets in American from whom greatness can be expected.” Besides being wrong, Simpson did Bly a disservice. In recent years, particularly in the long title-poem of Sleepers Joining Hands, Bly has too obviously strained to write great poetry. In The Loon he is refreshingly “off duty.” The Ox Head Press, which is noted for its fine quality printing, meets or exceeds its usual standard with this production, including as it does delicate hand-painted leaf ornaments for each poem.

Anyone who says, as Bly has said, that Auden left an evil legacy is suffering from a badly warped sense of moral categories. But matters aren't helped when Hollander, as if in defense of his mentor, says Bly is no poet. Who needs angelic standards? The remark about Auden simply signals Bly's untrustworthiness as a guide to a great segment of poetry written in English. Similarly, when he tells young people never to trust a teacher who teaches them a poem he or she hasn't memorized (goodbye, Paradise Lost; goodbye, “Immortality Ode”), he only establishes his irresponsibility. But Bly believes in excess and imbalance; he derides what he calls the “on-the-other-hand” man, the man who would say, “Yes, the Catholic Church has been guilty of great crimes, but on the other hand …” So there's a constant and deliberate listing to one side in Bly, a kind of madness that at its worst is simply crackpotism (those loving cabbages) but at its best sets him on the heroic adventure of saving his soul. To say that Bly has something of a Quixote or an Ahab about him gives him too much credit, but his questing has a scale to it beyond the ordinary. Bly is operatic—not in trying for aria-like passages the way Whitman did but by exemplifying in his work a quality conspicuously associated with the grand opera. Julius Novick, in a recent article titled “Last Bastion of Passion” (Horizon, May 1978), contrasts the world of nineteenth-century opera with that of most contemporary arts. He sees the former as characterized by “bold, grand, sweeping gestures … passionate extravagance. Operatic characters commit themselves to their own feelings as few of us are able to do.” Art in our time, he continues,

tends to speak through half-closed lips. … And as the means of expression have become, deliberately, more and more limited, so has the emotional spectrum of what is expressed. We live—and not just artistically—in the age of cool. … The point is that operatic characters give it (whatever it is) everything they've got. And somehow those crazy operatic people and their crazy feelings are not entirely strange to us. In some depth of our beings we are like them.

Bly is one of those crazy operatic characters. The ironic mode is anathema to him or simply out of the question. Bly would have us weep or rage. He would have us experience an emotional Divine Comedy. Yeats, whom Bly echoes both in and out of his poetry in a remarkable number of ways, developed a theory of the passionate man—as contrasted with the standardized “professional and abstract” man—that synchronizes with the entirety of Gopherwood. Not so coincidentally, Solzhenitsyn in his 1978 Harvard commencement address repeats this same concern about the increasing lack of “interesting characters” in the West. Bly's most obvious expression of this concern comes from “Walking to the Next Farm”:

There is some sort of energy that comes off the fierce man's hair. It is not a halo, but a background of flames. The energy increases, while “more and more docile men are being born each day.” As the Tibetan exhales, fifty pale men melt back into the ground. Huns fade back into the forest around Vienna, the doctor leaps up from his desk, he curses the stupidity of his life, grinds his teeth. Lenin refuses to eat with others. The carriage goes on through the night.

There is some typical Bly bullying here and perhaps Bly generally doesn't distinguish enough between the passionate man and the bully, but his “not a halo” can't fool anybody: Bly wants nothing less than to be a saint, albeit a saint of The New Age as described by Solzhenitsyn, the time when “our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern Era.” To wish Bly success would probably be out of place, not least of all because to journey toward such a goal is already itself an exemplary arrival.