SOURCE: Davis, William V. “The Poetry of Male Consciousness: The Man in the Black Coat Turns” and “The Poetry of Female Consciousness: Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.” In Robert Bly: The Poet and His Critics, pp. 53-69. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994.

THE POETRY OF MALE CONSCIOUSNESS: THE MAN IN THE BLACK COAT TURNS

At the beginning of the 1980s, Bly's work took a new turn. Perhaps this was inevitable after the return and renewal evidenced by his work during the 1970s. Perhaps it was inevitable for reasons related more to his life than to the literature. Whatever the causes, the shift that began with The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981) was immediately conspicuous and almost as quickly controversial from a critical point of view. As Davis points out, The Man in the Black Coat Turns is Bly's “symbolic turn toward home,” the “self-referential elegy” that “many writers come to.” As such, it describes and details the “end of the journey that Silence in the Snowy Fields had begun almost twenty years before.” Still, it is “more than a simple return” and should most properly be seen not as “an end but [as] another new beginning.” Furthermore, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, together with its companion volume, Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985), contains the most personal and private poems Bly has yet written. These two books therefore relate a great deal about Bly, man and poet, both where he has been and where he is going (1988, 133).

The poems in The Man in the Black Coat Turns are poems of “male consciousness,” and Bly has had a lot to say about what he took this term to mean. In the introduction to the selections from The Man in The Black Coat Turns in his Selected Poems (1986) Bly said, “In this book I fished in male waters, which I experienced as deep and cold but containing and nourishing some secret and moving life down below” (142). Surely it is the case that the significant contrasts in the critical response to Bly's poetry in the 1980s can often be specifically linked to the differing positions various critics have taken with respect to Bly's statements and actions outside of his poetry. Since this is so conspicuously the case, a brief summary of Bly's views on male consciousness is almost inevitable.

The Man in the Black Coat Turns took Bly more than ten years to write (Bly, 1981), and he has said that he wanted the poems “to rise out of some darkness beneath us” (Bly, 1986). As early as 1971, he mentioned the emergence of a “spiritual inflation” that marked a new stage of father consciousness in his thinking and his work (1971). In the following years he often discussed his theories of father consciousness or male consciousness in articles and interviews. In one of the most important of these, in 1976, he described his father, who “had to become a man too soon,” “wearing a large black coat,” “pursued by grief and depression,” but possessing a “gift for deep feeling,” so that other men “bobbed like corks around his silence” (205). Bly described himself, growing up, as a “typical ‘boy-god’”; but, he said, he learned through his father's example that “the indignation of the solitary man is the stone pin that connects this world to the next” (209, 217).¹

In many instances and a wide variety of places Bly has considered the implications of male consciousness on his thinking and for his poetry. In 1986, he discussed the “four seasons” of male development, which “amount to four stages, four steps and four events”: “bonding with and separation from the mother,” “bonding with and separation from the father,” finding “the male mother,” and “the interior marriage” with the “Invisible Czarina” of the Russian fairy tales (1986a, 42, 48). In his Selected Poems Bly said that these poems were “thoughts that I have thought for years.” “I aim in these poems,” he said, to “please the old sober and spontaneous ancestor males” (1986, 143, 144). In Iron John: A Book About Men (1990) Bly discussed the “deep male” and the need to accept “the nourishing dark,” to find the “dark way” to the “Wild Man” by “taking the road of ashes,” “learning to shudder,” and “moving from the mother's world to the father's world” so that “our sacrifices” would be “appropriate” rather than “unconscious, regressive, pointless, indiscriminate, self-destructive, and massive” (1990, 6, 70, 79, 240).² In The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men (1992) Bly spoke of “masculine sadness” as “a holy thing” and the “growth of a man” as “a power that gradually expands downward” in such a way that men “are more alive” as they grow older (97, 98).

Many of Bly's critics responded to The Man in the Black Coat Turns in the context of male consciousness. A representative sampling of these responses, which vary considerably, would include, on the one hand, Richman, who notes that The Man in the Black Coat was heralded as Bly's “long overdue reconciliation” with masculine consciousness even though he feels the poems are only “vaguely ‘about’ masculinity” and that “little else had changed” in this book with respect to Bly's work (1986, 44); and, on the other hand, Davis, who stresses the importance of the male consciousness thesis in the context of the theme of the father-son relationship that is so important in The Man in the Black Coat Turns and in the context of Bly's buttressing the book with the work done by Marie-Louise von Franz and others in the area of masculine psychology (1988, 137, 145).

Throughout his career Bly had supported his theoretical speculations without regard for any rigidly logical, or even any specifically consistent pattern or application; each of the various disciplines he borrowed from he drew from in the widest possible ways and applied in whatever ways seemed most useful or necessary to him at any given time. In this phase of his career, he relied heavily on Marie-Louise von Franz's The Feminine in Fairy Tales (1976), Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales (1980), and Puer Aeternus (1981); on James Hillman's The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology (1978), Re-Visioning Psychology (1978), and The Dream and the Underworld (1979); and on Erich Neumann's The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (1963), Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1968), C. G. Jung's The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature (1971) and Four Archetypes (1970), Jacob Boehme's Dialogues on the Supersensual Life (1901) and Psychologia Vera (1846), and the work of other thinkers—many of whom he had used and built upon earlier in his career as well. The most detailed tracing of these sources and influences throughout the course of Bly's career can be found in Howard (1969), Gitzen (1976), and Davis (1979-80, 1988, 1992).

When The Man in the Black Coat Turns was published in 1981 it was greeted with the same kind of ambivalent, if not quite as antithetical, responses from reviewers as those that had greeted This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood and This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years.

These reviews of The Man in the Black Coat Turns ranged from an estimate that considers it “thoughtful” and thus more accessible than Bly's earlier work (Anonymous, 1981) to others that find it filled with powerful and “surprising” meditations more committed to their own “unfolding” than to any “end result” (Roffman, 1981) or filled with clichés and thereby evoking only “conditioned responses” (Anonymous, 1982), in which the “carefully chosen details” are too often “interrupted by silly interjections” or arbitrarily “broken off” (Jarman, 1982). One reviewer even calls it “a clear case of an established important poet larded by his own theories and specialties of style, turning them into fetishes” or “self-consciously trying to be the poet we expect him to be” and thus writing poems that “fit his theories” in an attempt to “prove them valid,” with the end result that the poems mean “little” even though they have “the facade of Bly's earlier, better work” (Miller, 1983). Other critics responded to this “somber” book and to its poems with their “dark interiors” (Stitt, 1982) whose surfaces “crackle with energy and liveliness” (Stitt, 1992, 289), by labeling it a book “hauntingly” allusive and heavily suggestive, representing an impressive accomplishment in the “modern mainstream” (Stuewe, 1982) by a poet who had “never been more moving” (Jarman, 1982)—indeed, a powerful, impressive accomplishment, “easily [Bly's] richest, most complex book” (Stitt, 1982).

A suggestion of the animosity that this book evoked among reviewers can be seen in Miller's comment on Stitt's review: “Unfortunately, Bly's reputation is so formidable [that] it can cause a reviewer in The New York Times Book Review to call this collection Bly's ‘richest, most complex book,’ an absurd statement from my viewpoint” (1983).

Several of the reviews of The Man in the Black Coat Turns are particularly noteworthy. Perloff considers the “autobiographical” “concentration on fathers and sons” (which, she says, Bly had gotten from Theodore Roethke, one of his “central precursors,” and from Robert Lowell, his “arch-enemy”) and suggests that this autobiographical tendency represents a “swerve” toward the mode Bly had “always scorned”—indeed, even “dismissed as trivial and exhibitionistic”—as going counter to his earlier and stronger habit of writing a “poetics of immanent presence” (1982, 221): Therefore, she argues, there is a problem in reconciling the belief that poetry depends upon “the privileged moment when consciousness” enters the “realm of otherness” with “the linear story line of one's own life” (222). Bly's poetry in The Man in the Black Coat Turns is given over to “tendentious statement[s],” and it represents a sentimental falling off from his earlier poetry of images, as the I of Silence in the Snowy Fields becomes “pontificial” in The Man in the Black Coat Turns (224). In short, Bly has covered his tracks “all too successfully” (225) in many of these poems—such as “My Father's Wedding,” in which the “Father becomes Norwegian deity becomes vegetation god becomes Christ becomes a ‘massive masculine shadow.’” What these “mythic correspondences are meant to signify therefore remains murky” (225-26) and the poems are reduced to “phrase-making” and “the absence of meaning” (212). Perloff cites “Eleven O'Clock at Night” as one example of such “murkiness.”

Wesling describes The Man in the Black Coats Turns in terms of the “theme of male grief” and the relationship between a son and the “father he will replace” as well as the “son who will replace him” (1981a, 447). (Bly dedicated The Man in the Black Coat Turns to his son Noah Matthew.) This book, Wesling states, deals with “the great untouched subjects of fatherhood and replacement,” and in it Bly is best considered as a “preacher or wisdom-writer” (448). This book, he goes on to say, contains some of the best poems Bly has ever written.

Always one of Bly's most conscientious critics and reviewers, Molesworth considers the “loose stylistic unity” of The Man in the Black Coat Turns and finds the poems “challenging,” representative of Bly's “ethic,” and founded on “the principle of growth.” These poems (especially the prose poems, which Molesworth regards as Bly's best work) are, he argues, distinctive poems that subtly examine the intersections of “waking and archaic consciousness.” In “Finding an Ant Mansion” in particular, he says, Bly's “spiritual allegorizing” is “most forceful” and focused. Nevertheless, Molesworth thinks, the poems in this book will “take some getting used to” even for Bly's “partisan readers” (1982, 283).

Finally, Reynolds in a review that takes into consideration many of the earlier reviews and points toward the more substantial criticism of The Man in the Black Coat Turns and Bly's work still to come, argues that even before the feminist movement had reached national visibility, Bly had been “advocating the female principle as a viable alternative to male-dominated consciousness” (1983, 439). In this sense Bly has been prophetic in anticipating the temper of the 1970s, though his readers would be disappointed were they to expect a “similar prophetic vision for the 1980's,” since, if The Man in the Black Coat Turns is prophetic, “its prophecy lies in its poetics” (440). In the “meditative” and “death-ridden,” even “violent,” transitional poems of The Man in the Black Coat Turns, Bly, like the man in his title, may be a man turning toward “new vistas” or toward “his own death” (439, 440). The man in the black coat who turns “may be death who turns to wait for the poet.” Consequently, although Bly “reaffirms his missionary stance,” he “breaks no new ground” in this book. Therefore, Reynolds feels that what is to come next will be “crucial for Bly” (442).

Only a few significant critical articles have been published to date focusing specifically or definitively on The Man in the Black Coat Turns. Peters, stating that Bly's “techniques match up with his theories,” thinks the book represents “an advance of impressive dimensions” over his previous work and “should prove [to be] one of the seminal works of the eighties” (1982, 305). He analyzes a number of poems in the book and finds in them a “koanlike quality” of “unresolved suggestiveness” and a “thrill” in the “proximity to Death.” In the “father consciousness” poems Peters detects a merging of Bly's “own father- and sonhoods” in such a way that Bly “retrieves the specific from the universal” and redirects this motif to himself (311, 313).

Bly knows that The Man in the Black Coat Turns is both “another new beginning” and “the beginning of the end,” as Davis says (1982a 237). In this book, which contains some of the most “authentic” poems Bly has written, he has opened the “door of the self” in a way he has never done before (238). Tracing Bly's work through a series of thinkers (Jacob Boehme, Nicolas Berdyaev, Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, Paul Tillich, and Martin Heidegger), Davis tracks his metaphor of darkness as “source,” as “meaning deferred” and “developed around the metaphor of light,” through Bly's earlier work and shows how it has been brought to climax in The Man in the Black Coat Turns in such a way that the “treasures of darkness prophesied” in Silence in the Snowy Fields and The Light Around the Body are “here, finally, fully fulfilled” (239-40). Just as in News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness (1980). Bly's anthology that traces poetic history and attempts a “historical rediscovery of the poetic fathers” from his own point of view, so too in The Man in the Black Coat Turns Bly has attempted to rediscover his own “literal personal father(s)” (241).

The books on Bly develop many of the suggestions made by reviewers and other critics of The Man in the Black Coat Turns. Nelson, for instance, calls it “an extended meditation on the masculine soul” at the center of which is the “distinct and memorable figure of the poet's own father” (1984, 193). But other father figures are there too: the Father God, the Father Christ, and Odin the “All-father.” These are mixed and merged in poems like “My Father's Wedding,” “The Prodigal Son,” “Crazy Carlson's Meadow,” “The Grief of Men,” and others. In Nelson's view, Bly's contemplation of fathers and sons, of the “male soul,” and of the “grief of men” is “at the heart” of the book, as the “motif of sacrifice,” strong throughout the work, increases toward the end of it, and comes to climax in “Kneeling Down to Look Into a Culvert,” the final poem, which Nelson calls “a remarkable expression of a remarkable moment of consciousness” (218-19). Nelson finally sees The Man in the Black Coat Turns as “an affirmative book” in which Bly merges a “desire for healing and reconciliation” with an awareness of “griefs which do not heal” (230). Richman attacks Nelson as one of the “critics in Bly's thrall” who respond to this book “by relinquishing their critical powers.” He charges that Nelson “discovers allusions, ‘sexual metaphors,’ ‘symbols,’ and coherent imagery everywhere in the Bly oeuvre” and says that “Nelson's ability to misconstrue Bly's poetry … is remarkable.” He concludes, “For Bly and his critics, it is not enough for poetry to appeal to a primitive level of consciousness. It must be ‘composed’ by that consciousness too” (1986, 44-45).

For Sugg The Man in the Black Coat Turns presents Bly's “new subject,” the “family of man,” a family that by the end of the book has been redeemed through Bly's imagination in such a way that it is “neither unprepared for nor unjustified” (1986, 122-23). Bly's “psychic urge” to explore “man's identity” (most specifically in terms of the father-son dichotomy) is evidenced throughout the book even if this “archetypal figure/force” remains “unexplained and unpredictable.” Bly's voice in these poems, Sugg feels, has taken on the “impersonality of someone who is trying to understand his life in terms of universal patterns.” By the work's end Bly has made a “declaration” both about this book and about his canon to date. Like Thor on the Norse Doomsday, he would, in the words of Turville-Petre (1953), “step back dying, but not dismayed.” In The Man in the Black Coat Turns, Bly has found a “new use” for poetry, a way to “enter into the stream of nature's energies” (125, 131, 141).

Davis argues that the “recovery of the shadow,” which Bly described at length in A Little Book on the Human Shadow (1986), and the father-son relationship, which he detailed in his essay “Being a Lutheran Boy-God in Minnesota” (1976) and in his poems “Finding the Father” in This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood, and “The Grief of Men” and “My Father's Wedding 1924” in The Man in the Black Coat Turns, become the main foci of The Man in the Black Coat Turns. He notes that at the end of this book, “in a ritual that symbolized” a “sacrificial death as prelude to a new birth,” Bly, “like the man in the black coat, fulfills all the implications of the final word of the book's title, and turns” (1988, 151). Thus, this book, Davis says, tells Bly's readers and critics “a good deal about him now” and a great deal about “where he has been and where he is going” (133). Therefore, The Man in the Black Coat Turns both brings Bly's early work to climax and anticipates his work to come.

Harris, describes The Man in the Black Coat Turns as Bly's personal “archives” (1992, 103). Less “solipsistic” and “visionary” than his earlier work, these poems document “a record of life in the daily world” and trace the “history of men in a man” (105-6, 117). In this sense The Man in the Black Coat Turns represents “a Bly we have not seen before.” The central theme and focus of these poems, which Harris defines as the “neglect of the male,” shifts, she says, “from subject to self to psychic inadequacy” through the course of Bly's “incorporative journeying” in the book (110, 112, 121). In a more recent piece, she calls The Man in the Black Coat Turns “a gorgeous volume” in which Bly “contends with the consciousness that he has” and makes manifest both the collective unconscious and the “personal consciousness within its participatory universe” (1992a, 172).

Thus, there was considerable critical agreement about the poems in The Man in the Black Coat Turns. They were, the consensus seemed to suggest, both backward-looking and forward-looking; in them Bly succinctly summarized a number of his most important themes in especially immediate, revealing, and rewarding ways; and in the final section of the book he drew together his dominant theme of the father-son relationship, especially in “The Grief of Men,” which Davis (1992b, 274) called “clearly the climactic thesis piece for the whole book,” as he completed his portrait of male consciousness.

.....

THE POETRY OF FEMALE CONSCIOUSNESS: LOVING A WOMAN IN TWO WORLDS

If Bly had made a new beginning with the poems in The Man in the Black Coat Turns, focused as they were on “male consciousness,” he turned to the other side of the dichotomy with Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985), which focused on “female consciousness.” Since they so specifically complement one another from a thematic point of view and complement Bly's social and political activities with women's and men's groups during the 1980s, these two books ought properly to be read and even criticized together. Taken together, they are Bly's most personal and private poems, and, partly because they are inseparably associated with his life outside his literary life, they have become his most controversial poems since The Light Around the Body. Nonetheless, for the most part, they have been treated individually by Bly's critics and reviewers, as they are here.

The other most conspicuous element of the critical response to Loving a Woman in Two Worlds is that these poems, when they have not been almost completely ignored, have been the least seriously analyzed and the most fiercely attacked of all of Bly's poems. This is the case even though they represent another stage in Bly's “corrective response to his own earlier sexism,” as Lammon suggests (1991, 110). The attacks have come from virtually all quarters; they began early on and have not yet fully abated.

There are several other rather obvious reasons for the critical climate that surrounds, indeed seems almost to envelop, the poems of Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, Bly's most recent individual collection of new poems.³ First, it was quickly followed by Bly's Selected Poems (1986), which, not surprisingly, tended to eclipse it as well as all of the earlier books Bly had published. (Even Bly himself “seemed to shy away almost apologetically” [Davis, 1992, 18] from the selection of poems from Loving a Woman in Two Worlds that he included in his Selected Poems. In his prefatory note to them in the latter collection he wrote, “The poems are still close to me, and I won't say much about them. … Love poems … can so easily go out of tune” [172].) Furthermore, as Davis has suggested, perhaps the poems in Loving a Woman in Two Worlds “took critics by surprise, confused them,” or “even a bit embarrassed them” (1992, 12). Clearly, most critics were not prepared for the kind of overt love poems they encountered in Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, although they might have remembered that as long ago as in his essay “I Came Out of the Mother Naked” Bly had said, “Matriarchy thinking is intuitive and moves by associative leaps” (1975, 32).

For all of these reasons, the critical responses to Loving a Woman in Two Worlds have been, as Davis indicates, “slight, sketchy, unsystematic, and largely unsympathetic”; indeed, its major thrust suggests that the male-female consciousness explored in The Man in the Black Coat Turns and Loving a Woman in Two Worlds has “resulted in some of the weakest poems Bly has written”—though, since critics have had little time to consider the poems, their opinions may constitute only an “interim report” and be “far from definitive or final” (1992, 12).

Loving a Woman in Two Worlds received the fewest reviews of any of Bly's major books. One reviewer even concluded that it was “not a book meant for reviewers” (Brumer, 1985). The reviews were short, for the most part, and they were divided between essentially positive and largely negative responses to the book.

The positive responses find these “sparsely egocentric” love poems “neither radically confessional nor violent” in their imagery but uniting “intimacy with natural mystery” and “connecting eros to nature” (Emery, 1985)—poems that are “beautiful, strange, tender and powerful,” indeed “great poems,” even if some of them tend to be “a bit imperfect” or “a bit preachy” (Brumer, 1985). One of the problems with Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, according to Brumer, is “how not to feel like a voyeur” while reading the poems. He concludes, however, that readers come to feel “emotionally close” to the lovers in the poems rather than feeling as if they were “voyeuristically watching them through little poem-like windows.”

Other reviewers, although some of them think that Bly himself is often “noisy, preposterous, impolite, and self-inflated,” nevertheless appreciate the beauty, simplicity and “truth” of these poems “written in flat language without resonance” that yet still perfectly resonates with meaning—even if the meaning is “hardly in the words” but rather that the words frame a meaning which remains “unstated” (Hamill, 1987). Such reviewers are grateful for the “precise, evocative word pictures,” the ways that Bly has made “grief mystical” and “sadness liberating” (Raksin, 1987), and the ways in which the poems are, finally, simply “beautiful” (Hamill, 1987). In Dacey's view, these “weighty” poems, “soaked with feeling” and “strengthened by their willingness to face the failure of love,” represented the “culmination” of Bly's career to date; indeed, “Bly has apparently been waiting for years” to write Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, “not because it has been of secondary importance … but because he considered it too important to hurry” it (1986).

In one of the negative reviews—which are often based on exactly the same criteria that the positive responses are based on—Stuewe calls Loving a Woman in Two Worlds “all too often simply embarrassing” in its inability to describe “anything resembling deeply felt emotion,” and therefore a book that can “only detract from Bly's already somewhat problematic reputation” (1985). The single most negative review was brief and anonymous. This reviewer charges that Bly, “up to his old business of invocation and subcutaneous persuasion” and using his “familiar themes and methods,” falls flat or ends up with poems that appear to be “contrived” or “full of quaint echoes of Donne and Freud,” and that this “forced strangeness” and these curious juxtapositions, with their “undertones of reverence or foreboding,” are “comically inappropriate” and often little more than verbal or emotional clichés. The reviewer concludes, “I mean, this book stinks, folks. No kidding” (1986).

Chappell, balancing the positive and negative estimates of the other reviewers, argues that, even if Bly has become an “undiscountable element of contemporary poetic taste,” any poet who “fashions an extreme individual style,” as he has, may discover that he has “forged his own manacles” and that his poems may “melt together in a monochrome haze.” Nonetheless, he says, it is one “asset of an extreme style” that “even its most customary mannerisms may result in a good poem.” Chappell perhaps best summarizes the theme of most of the reviews when he says that, though this book “holds no surprises,” it has “broken no promises,” and finally, it stands as an important addition to a body of work that has “impressively persuaded a generation of poets and readers” (1985).

The reading, thinking, and writing that served as a background to Bly's poetry of male and female consciousness and thus to both The Man in the Black Coat Turns and Loving a Woman in Two Worlds had its genesis in the same sources that had earlier given Bly his psychological buttressing for Sleepers Joining Hands. This influence was traced to Jung and others by Bly's critics in the earlier stages of his career (see chapters three, five, and six). At this later date, however, there was a noticeable broadening of the basically Jungian influence, specifically to include the work of Erich Neumann, one of Jung's disciples. Following Jung, who said that the creative process had a “feminine quality,” and that creative work “arose from unconscious depths” in the “realm of the Mothers” (1971, 103), Neumann points out that “matriarchal consciousness” is “not confined to women” but exists in men too as part of their “anima-consciousness,” and that this is particularly true in creative people since “the creative is by its inherent nature related to matriarchal consciousness” (1973, 43, 58; also see Neumann, 1963 and 1969). Clearly, such a linkage between Neumann's notions of female consciousness and creativity was immediately attractive to Bly, and it was no more surprising that he used these ideas in his work than it was that his critics noticed them and began to analyze this work in terms of these ideas and influences.

In the earliest important essay to explore the general background of the Jungian tradition in Bly's poetry, Libby points out the dichotomy between male consciousness and female consciousness that is conspicuously evidenced in Bly's work and then aligns the separate sides of this dichotomy as it has been worked out in the poems along Jungian lines: masculine consciousness involves logic, efficiency, repression, and the “control of the natural world”; feminine consciousness includes intuition, creativity, and a “mystic acceptance of the world.” Furthermore, since only women can be “biologically creative,” men feel the “aesthetic urge to create” outside themselves—in poetry, for instance (1972, 85).

Libby traces these notions back through Bly's work to Sleepers Joining Hands and even earlier, arguing that, based on the evidence of his poems, Bly had seen “the mother coming up” through the psyche as early as 1970 (1972, 85). (Bly himself said in Selected Poems that he had begun “the poems that eventually became Loving a Woman in Two Worlds” in 1973, [172].) Davis (1992) suggests that it might be possible to go even further back, to one of Bly's earliest poems, “A Man Writes to a Part of Himself” (in Silence in the Snowy Fields), to find the source for the poems in Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.

It is interesting here to consider Bly's comments on “A Man Writes to a Part of Himself”:

I lived [alone] for several years in various parts of New York City … in small dark rooms … longing for “the depths”. … I saw the estrangement as a story: a man lives in a modern city, aware of a primitive woman bent over ground corn somewhere miles away, and though he is married to her, he has no living connection with her.

(Selected Poems, 12)

This “story” became the poem “A Man Writes to a Part of Himself,” which ends with these questions:

Which of us two then is the worse off?
And how did this separation come about?

Dacey says that “A Man Writes to a Part of Himself” “can be treated as a lens through which to view” Bly's work generally. He suggests that the predicament Bly describes in the poem is “as much cultural as personal” and that the speaker is a “representative citizen of the modern West” (1979). Harris argues that, although this poem “clearly asserts Jung's economy of a psyche with both masculine and feminine sides,” the “scaffolding” of the poem remains “patriarchal”; thus Bly “remains at its authoritative center” (1989, 125). Kalaidjian explicitly links this early poem to Bly's poetry of female consciousness and says that it “typifies Bly's early blindness to the feminine vision he would [come to] celebrate,” as he here “condescends to his anima,” since the “poet's feminine other is primitive” and “mute” and remains a “silent ‘other’ on the margins of male identity” (1989, 137-38). Lammon, surveying the earlier responses to this poem, suggests that most readers seem to be “interested in the ‘part’ of the man who is a woman,” but that “as Bly's journey brings him to where he needs to be,” he realizes that the “other ‘part,’ the ‘man,’ is the one he overlooked”; he also realizes that any synthesis between this man and woman becomes the “next step in a new dialectic” between men and women, between the poetry of male consciousness and female consciousness (1991, 209-10).

In several separate essays Victoria Frenkel Harris deals both generally and specifically with the feminine and the “female consciousness” in Bly's work. She considers the significance of intuition in poetry in general, the use of the “incorporative consciousness” in one of Bly's early poems, and Bly's use of female consciousness in yet another poem (see Harris, 1981, 1981a, 1985). She argues that in the literature of an era defined by the collapse of the “bifurcation” between the masculine and feminine natures, it is possible to find “psychic integration,” and the “nurturing” of the “woman within the man.” This sense of female consciousness, she feels, is especially evident in a poem like Bly's “Walking Where the Plows Have Been Turning” (Bly, 1979, 49), in which the reader can “witness” the “mythic woman powerfully” rising “within a male” (Harris, 1981, 123-24). In another essay, she says, with respect to “With Pale Women in Maryland,” “Suddenly, the poem turns into a woman” (1985, 55).

In a later essay Harris broadens, extends, and somewhat changes her argument as she considers specific questions of sexuality in Bly's work and states that, although his “desire to recuperate the fallen status of women is unquestionable,” his “brand of feminism,” by “valorizing intuition” through the use of the concepts of Jung and Neumann, conceals “remnants” of the very patriarchy he denounces. Therefore, when “an actual woman appears” in Loving a Woman in Two Worlds—as opposed to Silence in the Snowy Fields, in which “no woman” at all ever emerges and the “female omitted is she who has been historically oppressed”—she “often retains the position typifying patriarchal portraits of women” (as “the object for the subject, man”) and is “trivialized” because she “never speaks herself.” She remains “only an object,” only “the other, whose sexual plurality is reduced to the gap, a home for his fetishized penis” (Harris, 1989, 120, 126-27).

Rehder, likewise, criticizes Bly's treatment of women in Loving a Woman in Two Worlds. Although he singles out for specific attention “Letter to Her” as “another example” of Bly's “evasion of self-analysis,” calling it a poem that “runs out of honesty” and, after the “powerful” first stanza, ends in an “inconsequential” and “obscure set of images as self-justification,” Rehder describes the “woman” in “all the poems” in this book as an “extremely shadowy figure” who almost never speaks, has “no behavior,” and whose “body is mostly metaphors.” She only exists, he argues, as a “pretext for the poet's emotions” (1992, 278).

Kalaidjian discusses Bly's “attempts to elide history through a feminist poetics based in [the] depth psychology” of Johan Bachofen, Carl Jung, and Erich Neumann and finds that Bly's feminist verse is “contaminated” by patriarchal elements that “oppress even as they seek to celebrate feminine experience” (1989, 135). This is because Bly, though “lamenting sexual division,” ironically perpetuates it by lodging his “feminish critique within Bachofen's myth of mother right” and thereby falls prey to Bachofen's “Victorian representations of women.” Even though Bly tries “to talk back to patriarchy” through his use of the “idiom of the deep image,” he often succeeds in projecting “feminine Eros” only in “passive” images rather than the “empowering images of otherness” (137, 138). Thus he fails to “reflect critically on the sources of his depth psychology,” and his recent work lacks “revisionary force” and simply “escalates” the “psychosexual conflict” that has been evident from the beginning of his career—in the long poem “Sleepers Joining Hands,” for instance, and even in his essay “I Came Out of the Mother Naked” (in Sleepers Joining Hands), in which, according to Kalaidjian, Bly tries to “empower women's otherness,” even though “its feminine argument” is “flawed” (139, 140, 141).

Kalaidjian points out that “Bly's nostalgia for a prepatriarchal her-story” actually distorts the “historical experience of real women” (135). He cites, among others, Adrienne Rich, one of the most celebrated poets of Bly's generation, who argues that the “feminine principle” remains “elusive and abstract” for writers like Bly and seems to have “little connection with the rising expectations and consciousness of actual women.” Bly and others, Rich feels, “betrayed much of the time their unconscious patriarchal parochialism” (1977, 62-63).

Of the books published to date on Bly, only two treat Loving a Woman in Two Worlds. Davis associates the male consciousness poems of The Man in the Black Coat Turns with the female consciousness poems of Loving a Woman in Two Worlds by showing how Bly's revision of “Fifty Males Sitting Together” from the first book—which, in revised form, became the first poem in the second—ties these two consciousnesses, and thus these two books, together. Furthermore, he stresses the testing of the male consciousness of The Man in the Black Coat Turns by the female consciousness of Loving a Woman in Two Worlds as Bly, in “rough sequence,” follows the course of a relationship between a man and a woman in Loving a Woman in Two Worlds and, at the same time, is seemingly trying to establish Loving a Woman in Two Worlds as a prelude to his Selected Poems, which was published the following year (1988, 153). Davis comes to the conclusion that Loving a Woman in Two Worlds is not as successful as it might have been, and he criticizes it for courting sentimentality and sometimes succumbing to it.

In hypothesizing about how love poems might go “out of tune” in the introductory comments to Loving a Woman in Two Worlds in Selected Poems, Bly said that if the poem “veers too far toward actual events,” then its “eternal feeling” will be “lost in the static of our inadequacies,” and that if “we confine the poem only to what we feel,” then “the other person disappears” (172). Davis says that these “thematic considerations” are not what causes the love poems to go “out of tune” but rather the “poetic considerations,” which Bly had not mentioned and which Davis does not specifically define (although it is clear that he means primarily the explicit matters of poetics). Finally, Davis finds Loving a Woman in Two Worlds to be representative of yet another transitional stage in Bly's career, one that has not yet been passed through and therefore cannot yet be properly or definitively evaluated.

In a chapter that recapitulates, somewhat extends, and, most significantly, tends to back away from some of her earlier assertions, Harris likewise sees Loving a Woman in Two Worlds as a companion piece to The Man in the Black Coat Turns and even argues that the two books, taken together, serve as “an impulse toward psychic completion” as Bly “finally confronts his shadow” in The Man in the Black Coat Turns and, then, in Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, “celebrates the love for which that confrontation freed him” (1992, 121, 126).

However, for Harris (echoing other critics), the “limitations of Jungianism” with respect to women complicates Bly's “incorporative efforts” in Loving a Woman in Two Worlds. Because his earlier poetry has stressed only the archetypically “‘female’ elements” within his masculine psyche, he has not encountered particularly complex problems; when he attempts to integrate the masculine and the feminine in an “interpersonal context,” he encounters problems (121-22). These are especially evident in the “erotic” poems. Still, Harris believes, Loving a Woman in Two Worlds “celebrates the real woman Bly loves” and the “real love” that is made possible by “successful anima integration”—even though the “reduction of the female to body parts” in the erotic poems (thereby “accommodating her primarily to male sexuality”) makes “such spiritual investment especially questionable” if not specifically “offensive” (129-31). Too often, Bly's “phallocentric perspective” leads to a situation in which the woman “is objectified, her sexuality marginalized, her body reduced to mere accommodation”; therefore, the “vision” of these poems can be “attainable” only by a “male subject” (135-36).

Throughout her commentary on Loving a Woman in Two Worlds Harris bolsters her position with references to other female writers and critics who, although they have not dealt specifically with Bly and his poetry, are nevertheless crucial to her argument and would be crucial to the further critical commentary on the female-consciousness focus and discussion in Bly's work. The most important of these sources for female-consciousness criticism referred to by Harris include Marie-Louise von Franz (The Problem of Puer Aeternus, 1970); Esther M. Harding (Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modern, 1971); Frieda Fordham (An Introduction to Jung's Psychology, 1975); Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht (Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-Visions of Jungian Thought, 1985); Luce Irigaray (Speculum de l'autre femme, 1974, and This Sex Which Is Not One, 1985); Hélène Cixous (“The Laugh of Medusa,” 1976); and Dianne Griffin Crowder (“Amazons and Mothers: Monique Wittig, Hélène Cixous and Theories of Women's Writing,” 1983).

Harris concludes that while Loving a Woman in Two Worlds “delivers an actualized woman much of the time,” the woman presented in the “sex poems” is “trivialized” and exists only as an object. Therefore, while Bly as done “more than any male poet in this century to privilege the feminine,” his poems in this book are susceptible to the charge of the absence of discourse. When Bly turns from the poems that deal explicitly with sex, however, Harris argues that he achieves that sense of unity that has always been typical of his best poetry (136-37).

Bly's bifurcated, separated, but simultaneously integrated treatment of male and female consciousness in The Man in the Black Coat Turns and Loving a Woman in Two Worlds tended to divide his critics and cause some of them to change their minds about him, about his poetry, and about his work in general. What seemed to be needed next in Bly's career was some distancing that would allow the criticism to take his work into consideration over the long haul. Conveniently (as if he were already one step ahead of his critics), Bly's next book demanded such an overview.

Notes

1. For additional comments by Bly on this period of his life and work see Siemering (1975/76), Thompson (1982, 1984), Wagenheim (1990), and Appelbaum (1990).

2. Bly's controversial Iron John: A Book About Men immediately became a best-seller and remained on the New York Times best-seller list for more than a year—most of that time at the top of the nonfiction list. (Several years earlier, in 1987, Bly had published in embryo the basic theme and thesis of Iron John in The Pillow & The Key: Commentary on the Fairy Tale Iron John.) For a representative sampling of the critical responses to Iron John, see the Appendix, “Iron John: A Book About Men and the Critics.”

3. What Have I Ever Lost by Dying? (1992) consists of prose poems, many of them reprinted from earlier collections. …

Bibliography

All works are cited parenthetically in the text by author or editor and date.

Works by Robert Bly:

1958. “Five Decades of Modern American Poetry.” The Fifties 1: 36-39.

1959. “On English and American Poetry.” The Fifties 2: 45-47.

1959a. [Crunk.] “The Work of Donald Hall.” The Fifties 3: 32-46.

1959b. [Crunk.] “The Work of Robert Creeley.” The Fifties 2: 10-21.

1960. “On Current Poetry in America.” The Sixties 4: 28-29.

1960a. [Crunk.] “The Work of W. S. Merwin.” The Sixties 4: 32-43.

1961. “Poetry in an Age of Expansion.” Nation (22 April): 350-54.

1961a. “Some Notes on French Poetry.” The Sixties 5: 66-70.

1962. Silence in the Snowy Fields. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

1962a. “Prose vs Poetry.” Choice 2: 65-80.

1962b. With James Wright and William Duffy. The Lion's Tail and Eyes: Poems Written Out of Laziness and Silence. Madison, Minn.: The Sixties Press.

1962c. “On the Necessary Aestheticism of Modern Poetry.” The Sixties 6: 22-24.

1963. “A Wrong Turning in American Poetry.” Choice 3: 33-47.

1966. A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War. Madison, Minn.: The Sixties Press.

1966a. “The Dead World and the Live World.” The Sixties 8: 2-7.

1966b. [Crunk.] “The Work of James Wright.” The Sixties 8: 52-78.

1966c. “Concerning the Little Magazines: Something Like a Symposium.” Carleton Miscellany 7: 20-22.

1966d. The Sea and the Honeycomb. Madison, Minn.: The Sixties Press.

1967. The Light Around the Body. New York: Harper & Row.

1967a. “On Political Poetry.” Nation (24 April): 522-24.

1967b. “Leaping Up into Political Poetry.” London Magazine 7: 82-87.

1967c. “The First Ten Issues of Kayak.” Kayak 12: 45-49.

1967d. “Looking for Dragon Smoke.” Stand 9(1): 10-12.

1968. “Acceptance of the National Book Award for Poetry, March 6, 1968.” Tennessee Poetry Journal 2: 14-15.

1969. “Praise to the Opposites.” TransPacific 1: 4-5.

1969a. The Morning Glory: Another Thing That Will Never Be My Friend. San Francisco, Calif.: Kayak Books.

1970. (Editor.) Forty Poems Touching on Recent American History. Boston: Beacon Press.

1970a. “Crossing Roads.” Prairie Schooner 44(2): 146.

1970b. “A Conversation with Robert Bly.” Harvard Advocate 103: 4-8.

1970c. “The Masculine Versus the Feminine in Poetry: An Interview with William Heyen and Gregory Fitz Gerald.” [Videocassette recording.] Brockport, New York.

1970d. The Teeth Mother Naked at Last. San Francisco, Calif.: City Light Books.

1970e. The Morning Glory: Another Thing That Will Never Be My Friend. Second, revised and enlarged edition. San Francisco, Calif.: City Lights Books.

1971. “Symposium: What's New in American and Canadian Poetry.” New 15: 17-20.

1972. “American Poetry: On the Way to the Hermetic.” Books Abroad 46: 17-24.

1972a. “The Three Brains.” The Seventies 1: 61-69.

1972b. “Looking for Dragon Smoke.” The Seventies 1: 3-8.

1973. Sleepers Joining Hands. New York: Harper & Row.

1973a. “Developing the Underneath.” American Poetry Review 2(6): 44-45.

1973b. “The War Between Memory and Imagination.” American Poetry Review 2(5): 49-50.

1973c. Jumping Out of Bed. Barre, Mass.: Barre Publishers.

1974. Point Reyes Poems. Half Moon Bay, Calif.: Mundra.

1975. Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations. Boston: Beacon Press.

1975a. Old Man Rubbing His Eyes. Greensboro, N.C.: Unicorn Press.

1975b. The Morning Glory. New York: Harper & Row.

1976. “Being a Lutheran Boy-God in Minnesota.” In Growing Up in Minnesota: Ten Writers Remember Their Childhoods, edited by Chester G. Anderson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

1976a. “Praising Consciousness: Male and Female.” Ten Points: A Magazine of the Arts (Summer): 11-15.

1976b. “Conversation with Robert Bly.” [Interview with Kevin Power.] Texas Quarterly 19(3): 80-94.

1977. “What the Prose Poem Carries with It.” American Poetry Review 6(3): 44-45.

1977a. This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood. New York: Harper & Row.

1978. “Where Have All the Critics Gone.” Nation (22 April): 456-59.

1979. This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years. New York: Harper & Row. (New, revised edition, 1992.)

1979a. “The Two Presences.” In This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years. New York: Harper & Row.

1979b. “Poet at Large: A Conversation with Robert Bly.” WHET-TV New York (19 February): Educational Broadcasting Corporation.

1980. Talking All Morning. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

1980a. “Two Stages of an Artist's Life.” Georgia Review 34(1): 105-9.

1980b. (Editor.) News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

1980c. “A Meditation on a Poem by Goethe.” In News of the Universe 280-85.

1980d. “A Meditation on a Poem by Yeats.” In News of the Universe 286-93.

1981. The Man in the Black Coat Turns. New York: Dial Press.

1981a. “Recognizing the Image as a Form of Intelligence.” Field 24: 17-27.

1981/82. “Response to Frederick Turner.” Missouri Review 5(2): 189-91.

1982. “What Men Really Want.” [An Interview with Robert Bly.] New Age Journal (May): 30-37, 50-51.

1983. The Eight Stages of Translation. Boston: Rowan Tree Press.

1984. “In Search of an American Muse.” New York Times Book Review (22 January): 1, 29.

1985. Loving a Woman in Two Worlds. New York: Dial Press.

1985a. “The Mind Playing.” In Singular Voices: American Poetry Today, edited by Stephen Berg. New York: Avon Books.

1986. Selected Poems. New York: Harper & Row.

1986a. “Men's Initiation Rites.” Utne Reader (April/May): 42-49.

1986b. A Little Book on the Human Shadow. Edited by William Booth. Memphis: Raccoon Books.

1986c. “Whitman's Line as a Public Form.” In Selected Poems: 194-98.

1986d. “The Prose Poem as an Evolving Form.” In Selected Poems: 199-204.

1987. The Pillow & the Key: Commentary on the Fairy Tale Iron John. St. Paul: Minn.: Ally Press.

1989. “Connecting with the Wild Man Inside All Males.” [Interview with Keith Thompson.] Utne Reader (November-December): 58.

1990. American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity. New York: Harper & Row.

1990a. Iron John: A Book About Men. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

1990b. “Father and Son,” In Mother Father, edited by Harry A. Wilmer. Wilmette, Ill.: Chiron Publications.

1990c. “A Gathering of Men with Bill Moyers and Robert Bly.” (8 January) New York: Public Affairs Television.

1990d. “Stalking the Wild Man.” New Age Journal (October): 43, 45.

1990e. Ten Poems of Francis Ponge Translated by Robert Bly and Ten Poems of Robert Bly Inspired by the Poems of Francis Ponge. Riverview, New Brunswick: Owl's Head Press.

1991. “Fantasies of Gender Violence.” [A Letter.] New York Times Book Review (22 December): 4.

1992a. (Editor, with James Hillman and Michael Meade.) The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men. New York: HarperCollins.

1992b. What Have I Ever Lost by Dying? New York: HarperCollins.

Critical Works

Boehme, Jacob. 1846. Psychologia Vera, Sämmtlicke Werke, Vol. 6. Edited by K. W. Schiebler. Leipzig: A. Barth.

———. 1901. Dialogues on the Supersensual Life. Edited by Bernard Holland. London: Methuen.

MacLean, Paul. 1949. “Psychosomatic Disease and the ‘Visceral Brain.’” Psychosomatic Medicine 2: 338-53.

Turville-Petre, E. O. G. 1953. Origins of Icelandic Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Frye, Northrop. 1957. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

MacLean, Paul. 1958. “Contrasting Functions of Limbic and Neocortical Systems of the Brain and Their Relevance to Psychophysiological Aspects of Medicine.” American Journal of Medicine 25(4): 611-26.

Anonymous. 1962. [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] The Booklist (1 December): 274.

Clunk. 1962. [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] Burning Deck 1: 58.

Hall, Donald, editor. 1962. Contemporary American Poetry. Baltimore: Penguin.

MacLean, Paul. 1962. “New Findings Relevant to the Evolution of Psychosexual Functions of the Brain.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 135(4): 289.

Anonymous. 1963/64. [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] Beloit Poetry Journal 14: 39

Brooks, Cleanth. 1963. “Poetry Since ‘The Waste Land.’” Southern Review, N.S. 1(3): 487-500.

Colombo, John Robert. 1963. “Poetry Chronicle.” [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] Tamarack Review 26: 86-95.

Derleth, August. 1963. “Books of the Times.” [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] The Capital Times (17 January): 20.

Fowlie, Wallace. 1963. “Not Bards So Much as Catalyzers.” [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] New York Times Book Review (12 May): 36.

Gunn, Thom. 1963. “Poems and Books of Poems.” [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] Yale Review 53: 142.

Hughes, D. J. 1963. “The Demands of Poetry.” [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] Nation (5 January): 16-18.

Jerome, Judson. 1963. “A Poetry Chronicle—Part I.” [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] Antioch Review 23(1): 109-24.

Jones, Le Roi. 1963. “The Colonial School of Melican Poetry (or, ‘Aw, man, I read those poems before …’).” Kulchur 10: 83-84.

Kelly, Robert. 1963. [Interview.] In The Sullen Art: Interviews with Modern American Poets, edited by David Ossman. New York: Corinth Books.

Mills, Ralph J., Jr. 1963. “Four Voices in Recent American Poetry.” [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] Christian Scholar 46(4): 324-45.

Neumann, Erich. 1963. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Nordell, Roderick. 1963. “From the Bookshelf: A Poet in Minnesota.” [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] Christian Science Monitor (23 January): 9.

Rothenberg, Jerome. 1963. [Interview.] In The Sullen Art: Interviews with Modern American Poets, edited by David Ossman. New York: Corinth Books.

Simpson, Louis. 1963. “Poetry Chronicle.” [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] Hudson Review 16(1): 130-40.

Sorrentino, Gilbert. 1963. [Review of The Lion's Tail and Eyes: Poems Written Out of Laziness and Silence.] Kulchur 10: 84-86.

Stepanchev, Stephen. 1963. “Chorus of Versemakers: A Mid-1963 Medley.” [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] New York Herald Tribune Books (11 August): 7.

Stitt, Peter. 1963. “Robert Bly's World of True Images.” Minnesota Daily, “Ivory Tower.” (8 April): 29, 47.

Eshleman, Clayton. 1964. [Review of Twenty Poems of César Vallejo.] Kulchur 14: 88-92.

Locke, Duane. 1964. “New Directions in Poetry.” dust 1: 68-69.

MacLean, Paul. 1964. “Man and His Animal Brains.” Modern Medicine (2 March): 95-106.

Guest, Barbara. 1965. “Shared Landscapes.” [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] Chelsea 16: 150-52.

Mills, Ralph J., Jr. 1965. Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Random House.

Stepanchev, Stephen. 1965. American Poetry Since 1945. New York: Harper & Row.

Lindenau, Judith. 1966. [Review of A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War.] South Dakota Review 4(4): 89.

Zweig, Paul. 1966. “The American Outsider.” Nation (14 November): 517-19.

Anonymous. 1967. “Chained to the Parish Pump.” [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] Times Literary Supplement (16 March): 220.

———. 1967a. [Review of The Sea and the Honeycomb.] El Corno Emplumado 21: 111.

Clayre, Alasdair. 1967. “Recent Verse.” [Review of The Sea and the Honeycomb.] Encounter 29: 78.

Hamilton, Ian. 1967. “On the Rhythmic Run.” [Review of Silence in the Snowy Fields.] Observer (20 March): 23.

M. R. 1967. [Review of A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War.] El Corno Emplumado (23 July): 149-50.

Rexroth, Kenneth. 1967/68. “The Poet as Responsible.” [Review of The Light Around the Body and A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War.] Northwest Review 9(2): 116-18.

Simpson, Louis. 1967. “Dead Horses and Live Issues.” Nation (24 April): 521.

Wheat, Allen. 1967. “Solitude and Awareness: The World of Robert Bly.” Minnesota Daily, “Irovy Tower.” (October): 19-23, 44.

Anonymous. 1968. “Special Pleading.” [Review of The Light Around the Body.] Times Literary Supplement (15 August): 867.

Benedikt, Michael. 1968. “The Shapes of Nature.” Poetry 113: 211-12.

Bland, Peter. 1968. [Review of The Light Around the Body.] London Magazine 8: 95-97.

Brownjohn, Alan. 1968. “Pre-Beat.” New Statesman (2 August): 146.

Burns, Gerald. 1968. “U. S. Poetry 1967—The Books That Matter.” Southwest Review 53: 103.

Campbell, Joseph. 1968. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Carruth, Hayden. 1968. “Comment.” [Review of The Light Around the Body.] Poetry 112(6): 418-27.

Goldman, Michael. 1968. “Joyful in the Dark.” [Review of The Light Around the Body.] New York Times Book Review (18 February): 10, 12.

Hamilton, Ian. 1968. “Public Gestures, Private Poems.” [Review of The Light Around the Body.] Observer (30 June): 24.

Koestler, Arthur. 1968. The Ghost in the Machine. New York: Macmillan.

Leibowitz, Herbert. 1968. “Questions of Reality.” [Review of The Light Around the Body.] Hudson Review 21(3): 553-57.

Mazzocco, Robert. 1968. “Jeremiads at Half-Mast.” [Review of The Light Around the Body.] New York Review of Books (10 June): 22-25.

Simpson, Louis. 1968. “New Books of Poems.” [Review of The Light Around the Body.] Harper's (August): 74-75.

Smith. 1968. “The Strange World of Robert Bly.” The Smith 8: 184-85.

Symons, Julian. 1968. “New Poetry.” [Review of The Light Around the Body.] Punch (25 July): 136.

Taylor, W. E. 1968. “The Chief.” Poetry Florida And 1: 12-16.

von Bertalanffy, Ludwig. 1968. General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications. New York: Braziller.

Zinnes, Harriet. 1968. “Two Languages.” [Review of The Light Around the Body.] Prairie Schooner 42(2): 176-78.

Zweig, Paul. 1968. “A Sadness for America.” [Review of The Light Around the Body.] Nation (25 March): 418-20.

Fair, Charles M. 1969. The Dying Self. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.

Heyen, William. 1969. “Inward to the World: The Poetry of Robert Bly.” The Far Point 3: 42-50.

Howard, Richard. 1969. Alone With America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950. New York: Atheneum.

Matthews, William. 1969. “Thinking About Robert Bly.” Tennessee Poetry Journal 2(2): 49-57.

Neumann, Erich. 1969. Art and the Creative Unconscious. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gullans, Charles. 1970. “Poetry and Subject Matter, From Hart Crane to Turner Cassity.” Southern Review N.S. 6: 503-5.

Jung, C. G. 1970. Four Archetypes. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Piccione, Anthony. 1970. “Robert Bly and the Deep Image.” Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio University.

Eshleman, Clayton. 1971/72. “In Defense of Poetry.” Review 4/5: 39-47.

Frye, Northrop. 1971. The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Gitlin, Todd. 1971. “The Return of Political Poetry.” Commonweal (23 July): 377.

Harding, Esther M. 1971. Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modern. New York: Putnam.

Heffernan, Michael. 1971. “Brief Reviews.” [Review of The Teeth Mother Naked at Last.] Midwest Quarterly 12: 355-56.

Jung, C. G. 1971. The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Collected Works, Vol. 15. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Katz, Bill. 1971. “The Book Review.” [Review of The Teeth Mother Naked at Last.] Library Journal (15 February): 641.

M. D. 1971. “Bookmarks.” [Review of The Teeth Mother Naked at Last.] Prairie Schooner 45(1): 92-93.

Naiden, James. 1971. “Vietnam Everyone's Fault? Poetry Protesting War ‘Crashing Bore’.” [Review of The Teeth Mother Naked at Last.] Minneapolis Star (30 March): 1B.

Anonymous. 1972. [Review of Sleepers Joining Hands.] Kirkus Reviews 40 (15 October): 1217.

Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine.

Hillman, James. 1972. The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology. New York: Harper & Row.

Lacey, Paul. 1972. The Inner War: Forms and Themes in Recent American Poetry. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

Libby, Anthony. 1972. “Robert Bly Alive in Darkness.” Iowa Review 3(3): 78-89.

Ponge, Francis. 1972. The Voice of Things. Translated by Beth Archer. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Cavitch, David. 1973. “Poet as Victim and Victimizer.” New York Times Book Review (18 February): 2-3.

Chamberlin, J. E. 1973. ‘Poetry Chronicle.” [Review of Jumpiong Out of Bed.] Hudson Review 26(2): 398-99.

Hall, Donald. 1973. “Notes on Robert Bly and Sleepers Joining Hands.” Ohio Review 15(1): 89-93.

Hamilton, Ian. 1973. “The Sixties Press.” A Poetry Chronicle: Essays and Reviews. London: Faber & Faber.

Hyde, Lewis. 1973. “Let Other Poets Whisper … You Can Hear Bly.” Minneapolis Tribune (25 February): 10D-11D.

Libby, Anthony. 1973. “Fire and Light, Four Poets to the End and Beyond.” Iowa Review 4(2): 111-26.

Lindquist, Ray. 1973/74. [Review of Sleepers Joining Hands.] New 22 & 23: 88-89.

Naiden, James. 1973. “Echoes Don't Lessen Poet Bly's Strength.” [Review of Sleepers Joining Hands and Jumping Out of Bed.] Minneapolis Star (20 November): 2 B.

Neumann, Erich. 1973. “On the Moon and Matriarchal Consciousness.” In Fathers and Mothers: Five Papers on the Archetypal Background of Family Psychology. Translated by Hildegard Nagel. Zürich: Spring Publications.

Oates, Joyce Carol. 1973. “Where They All Are Sleeping.” [Review of Sleepers Joining Hands.] Modern Poetry Studies 4(3): 341-44.

Oppenheimer, Joel. 1973. “A Newspaper Reader's Garden of Verse.” [Review of Sleepers Joining Hands.] Newday (5 August): 20.

Piccione, Anthony. 1973. “Bly: Man, Voice and Poem.” Ann Arbor Review 15-16: 86-90.

Reinhold, Robert. 1973. “The Bly Mother.” [Review of The Teeth Mother Naked at Last.] The Smith 22/23: 74-79.

Skelton, Robin. 1973. “Robert Bly's New Book.” [Review of Sleepers Joining Hands.] Kayak 33: 66-69.

Skinner, Knute. 1973. [Review of The Morning Glory.] Concerning Poetry 6: 89.

Sternberg, Mary. 1973. “New Work Based on Poet's Theories.” Times-Advocate (4 February): 13.

Stitt, Peter. 1973. “James Wright and Robert Bly.” [Review of Sleepers Joining Hands and James Wright's Two Citizens.] Hawaii Review 2: 89-94.

Walsh, Chad. 1973. “Wry Apocalypse, Revolutionary Petunias.” Washington Post Book World (1 April): 13.

Zinnes, Harriet. 1973. “Images Plunging Inward.” New Leader 56 (9 July): 19.

Anonymous. 1974. [Review of Jumping Out of Bed.] Choice 11: 434.

———. 1974a. [Review of Bly's translation of Lorca and Jiménez: Selected Poems.] Choice 11: 98.

Emma, Joan E. 1974. “Letters.” American Poetry Review 3(1): 53-54.

Irigaray, Luce. 1974. Speculum de l'autre femme. Paris: Editions de Minuit.

Mersmann, James. 1974. Out of the Vietnam Vortex: A Study of Poets and Poetry Against the War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Ramsey, Paul. 1974. “American Poetry in 1973.” [Review of Sleepers Joining Hands.] Sewanee Review 82(2): 401-2.

Simpson, Louis. 1974. “Letters.” American Poetry Review 3(1): 53.

Williamson, Alan. 1974. “Language Against Itself: The Middle Generation of Contemporary Poets.” In American Poetry Since 1960: Some Critical Perspectives, edited by Robert B. Shaw. Chester Springs: Pa.: Dufour Editions.

Anonymous. 1975. [Review of The Morning Glory.] Publishers Weekly 208: 54.

———. 1975a. [Review of Old Man Rubbing His Eyes.] Publishers Weekly 207: 74.

———. 1975b. [Review of Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations.] Kirkus Reviews 43 (1 September): 1023-24.

Bedell, Thomas D. 1975. “Book Review.” [Review of The Morning Glory.] Library Journal (1 November): 2056-57.

Capra, Fritjof. 1975. The Tao of Physics. Berkeley, Calif.: Shambhala Publications.

Edson, Russell. 1975. “Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man: Some Subjective Ideas or Notions on the Care and Feeding of Prose Poems.” Field 13: 19-29.

Fordham, Frieda. 1975. An Introduction to Jung's Psychology. Middlesex, Great Britain: Penguin.

Garrison, Joseph. 1975. “Book Review.” [Review of Old Man Rubbing His Eyes.] Library Journal (1 April): 674.

Hillman, James. 1975. Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper & Row.

Molesworth, Charles. 1975. “Thrashing in the Depths: The Poetry of Robert Bly.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 29(3-4): 95-117.

Plumly, Stanley. 1975. “Books.” [Review of The Morning Glory.] American Poetry Review 4(6): 44-45.

Siemering, Bill. 1975. Mother Consciousness. [Videocassette recording.] (20 May) Minnesota Public Radio.

Siemering, Bill. 1975/76. “The Mother: An Interview with Robert Bly.” Dacotah Territory 12: 30-34.

Altieri, Charles. 1976. “Gary Snyder's Turtle Island: The Problem of Reconciling the Roles of Seer and Prophet.” Boundary 2 4(3): 761-77.

Anonymous. 1976. [Review of The Morning Glory.] Choice 13: 220.

———. 1976a. [Review of The Morning Glory.] Booklist (15 April): 1162

Atkinson, Michael. 1976. “Robert Bly's Sleepers Joining Hands: Shadow and Self.” Iowa Review 7(4): 135-53.

Benedikt, Michael. 1976. The Prose Poem: An International Anthology. New York: Dell.

Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of Medusa.” Signs 1: 875-93.

Edson, Russell. 1976. “The Prose Poem in America.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 5(1): 321-25.

Gitzen, Julian. 1976. “Floating on Solitude: The Poetry of Robert Bly.” Modern Poetry Studies 7(3): 231-41.

Lattimore, Richard. 1976. “Poetry Chronicle.” [Review of The Morning Glory.] Hudson Review 29(1): 128-29.

Lensing, George S., and Ronald Moran. 1976. Four Poets and the Emotive Imagination: Robert Bly, James Wright, Louis Simpson, and William Stafford. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Mills, Ralph J., Jr. 1976/77. “‘The Body With the Lamp Lit Inside’: Robert Bly's New Poems.” Northeast 3(2): 37-47.

Schjotz-Christensen, H. 1976. “Death and the Poet.” [Review of Old Man Rubbing His Eyes.] Moons and Lion Tailes 4: 70-72.

von Franz, Marie-Louise. 1976. The Feminine in Fairy Tales. New York: Spring Publications.

Anonymous. 1977. [Review of This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood.] Kirkus Reviews 45: 1087.

Cooney, Seamus. 1977. “The Book Review.” [Review of Sleepers Joining Hands.] Library Journal (October): 3163.

Davis, William V. 1977. “Defining the Age.” [Review of The Morning Glory.] Moons and Lion Tailes 2(3): 85-89.

———. 1977a. “Concert of One.” [Unpublished Review of This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood].

Friberg, Ingegerd. 1977. Moving Inward: A Study of Robert Bly's Poetry. Göteborg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothaburgensis.

Helms, Alan. 1977. “Two Poets.” [Review of Sleepers Joining Hands.] Partisan Review 44(2): [284]-88.

Mersmann, James F. 1977. “Robert Bly: Rediscovering the World.” [Review of The Morning Glory.] Aura 6: 40.

Rich, Adrienne. 1977. Of Woman Born. New York: Bantam.

Williams, Harry. 1977. “The Edge Is What I Have:” Theodore Roethke and After. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press.

Bliss, Shepherd. 1978. “Balancing Feminine and Masculine: The Mother Conference in Maine.” East/West Journal (February): 36-39.

Breslin, Paul. 1978. “How to Read the New Contemporary Poem.” American Scholar 47(3): 357-70.

Cotter, James Finn. 1978. “Poetry Reading.” [Review of This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood.] Hudson Review 31(1): 214-15.

Dacey, Philip. 1978. “This Book Is Made of Turkey Soup and Star Music.” [Review of This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood.] Parnassus: Poetry in Review 7(1): 34-45.

Daniels, Stevie, Lyndia LeMole, and Sherman Goldman. 1978. “Robert Bly on the Great Mother and the New Father.” East/West Journal (August): 25-33.

———. 1978a. “Robert Bly on the Great Mother and the New Father.” East/West Journal (September): 42-46.

Dodd, Wayne. 1978. “Robert Bly: An Interview.” Ohio Review 19(3): 32-48.

Dresbach, David. 1978. [Review of The Morning Glory.] Greenfield Review 6: 182-87.

Fass, Ekbert. 1978. “Robert Bly.” In Towards a New American Poetics: Essays and Interviews. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press.

Fuller, John. 1978. “Where the Cold Winds Blow.” [Review of This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood.] Times Literary Supplement (14 April): 410.

Hillman, James. 1978. The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology. New York: Harper Colophon.

Kenner, Hugh. 1978. “Three Poets.” [Review of This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood.] New York Times Book Review (1 January): 10.

M. K. S. 1978. “Books in Brief.” [Review of Old Man Rubbing His Eyes.] Beloit Poetry Journal 28: 40.

Molesworth, Charles. 1978. [Review of This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood.] Georgia Review 32(3): 686-88.

———. 1978a. “Domesticating the Sublime: Bly's Latest Poems.” Ohio Review 19(3): 56-66.

———. 1978b. “Contemporary Poetry and the Metaphors for the Poem.” Georgia Review 32(2): 319-31.

Ringold, Francine. 1978. [Review of This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood.] World Literature Today 52: 471.

Saunders, William S. 1978. “Indignation Born of Love: James Wright's Ohio Poems.” Old Northwest 4: 353-69.

Altieri, Charles. 1979. Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960s. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press.

Anonymous. 1979. [Review of This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years.] Publishers Weekly 216: 99.

——— 1979a. [Review of This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years.] Kirkus Reviews 47: 849.

Carroll, Paul. 1979. “On Bly's Kabir.” [Review of The Kabir Book.] American Poetry Review 8: 30-31.

Dacey, Philip. 1979. “The Reverend Robert E. Bly, Pastor, Church of the Blessed Unity: A Look at ‘A Man Writes to a Part of Himself.’” Pebble 18/19/20: 1-7.

Davis, William V. 1979/80. “‘Hair in a Baboon's Ear’: The Politics of Robert Bly's Early Poetry.” Carleton Miscellany 18(1): 74-84.

Garrison, Joseph. 1979. “Book Review.” [Review of This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years.] Library Journal (August): 1569.

Haskell, Dennis. 1979. “The Modern American Poetry of Deep Image.” Southern Review (Australia) 12: 137-66.

Hillman, James. 1979. The Dream and the Underworld. New York: Harper & Row.

Molesworth, Charles. 1979. The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Weinberger, Eliot. 1979. “Gloves on a Mouse.” [Review of This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years.] Nation (17 November): 503-4.

Altieri, Charles. 1980. “From Experience to Discourse: American Poetry and Poetics in the Seventies.” Contemporary Literature 21(2): 191-224.

Carruth, Hayden. 1980. “Poets on the Fringe.” [Review of This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years.] Harper's (January): 79.

Cotter, James Finn. 1980. “Poetry, Ego and Self.” [Review of This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years.] Hudson Review 33(1): 131-32.

Janik, Del Ivan. 1980. [Review of This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years.] Aspen Anthology (Winter): 83-84.

Stitt, Peter. 1980. “The World at Hand.” [Review of This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years.] Georgia Review 34(3): 663-66.

Turner, Frederick. 1980. “‘Mighty Poets in Their Misery Dead’: A Polemic on the Contemporary Poetic Scene.” Missouri Review 4(1): 77-96.

von Franz, Marie-Louise. 1980. Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales. Irving, Tex.: Spring Publications.

Wilden, Anthony. 1980. System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. 2nd ed. New York: Tavistock.

Williamson, Alan. 1980. “Music to Your Ears.” [Review of This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years.] New York Times Book Review (9 March): 8-9, 14-15.

Agee, Joel. 1981. “Pony or Pegasus.” [Review of Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke.] Harper's 263 (September): 70-72.

Anonymous. 1981. [Review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns.] Publishers Weekly 220: 48.

Berman, Morris. 1981. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Davis, William V. 1981. “‘At the Edges of the Light’: A Reading of Robert Bly's Sleepers Joining Hands.” Poetry East 4/5: 265-82.

Haines, John. 1981. “Robert Bly: A Tiny Retrospect.” Poetry East 4/5: 190-93.

Hall, Donald. 1981. “Poetry Food.” Poetry East 4/5: 35-36.

Harris, Victoria Frenkel. 1981. “‘Walking Where the Plows have Been Turning’: Robert Bly and Female Consciousness.” Poetry East 4/5: 123-38.

———. 1981a. “Criticism and the Incorporative Consciousness.” Centennial Review 25(4): 417-34.

Jones, Richard, and Kate Daniels. 1981. Of Solitude and Silence: Writings on Robert Bly. Boston: Beacon Press.

Libby, Anthony. 1981. “Dreaming of Animals.” Plainsong 3(2): 47-54.

Mills, Ralph J., Jr. 1981. “‘Of Energy Compacted and Whirling’: Robert Bly's Recent Prose Poems.” New Mexico Humanities Review 4(2): 29-49.

Nelson, Cary. 1981. Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Orr, Gregory. 1981. “The Need for Poetics: Some Thoughts on Robert Bly.” Poetry East 4/5: 116-22.

Roffman, Rosaly DeMaios. 1981. “Book Review.” [Review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns.] Library Journal 106: 2032.

Rolf, Fjelde. 1981. “Poems as Meeting Places.” [Review of Bly's translation of Tomas Tranströmer's Truth Barriers.] New York Times Book Review (26 April): 26.

Saucerman, James R. 1981. [Review of This Tree Will Be Here For a Thousand Years.] Western American Literature 16(2): 162-64.

Seal, David. 1981. “Waking to ‘Sleepers Joining Hands’.” Poetry East 4/5: 234-63.

Turner, Frederick. 1981-82. “Response to Mr. Bly.” Missouri Review 5(2): 196-98.

von Franz, Marie-Louise. 1981. Puer Aeternus. Boston: Sigo Press.

Wesling, Donald. 1981. “The Recent Work of Donald Hall and Robert Bly.” [Review essay of This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years and Talking All Morning.] Michigan Quarterly Review 20(2): 144-54.

———. 1981a. “The Wisdom-Writer.” [Review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns.] Nation (31 October): 447-48.

Zavatsky, Bill. 1981. “Talking Back: A Response to Robert Bly.” Poetry East 4/5: 86-98.

Anonymous. 1982. [Review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns.] Booklist (1 January): 582.

Capra, Fritjof. 1982. The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Davis, William V. 1982. “‘Camphor and Gopherwood’: Robert Bly's Recent Poems in Prose.” Modern Poetry Studies 11(1&2): 88-102.

———. 1982a. “‘Still the Place Where Creation Does Some Work on Itself’: Robert Bly's Most Recent Work.” In Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake, edited by Joyce Peseroff (1984). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Jarman, Mark. 1982. “The Poetry of Non Sequitur: The Man in the Black Coat Turns.” American Book Review 4(4): 13-14.

Hass, Robert. 1982. “Looking for Rilke.” In The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited by Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House.

Heller, Erich. 1982. “On Translating Lyric Poetry.” [Review of Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke.] New Republic (3 March): 27-31.

Molesworth, Charles. 1982. [Review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns.] Western American Literature 17(3): 282-84.

Perloff, Marjorie. 1982. “Soft Touch.” [Review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns.] Parnassus: Poetry in Review 10(1): 209-30.

Peters, Robert. 1982. “News from Robert Bly's Universe: The Man in the Black Coat Turns.” In Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake, edited by Joyce Peseroff (1984). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Shakarchi, Joseph. 1982. “An Interview with Robert Bly.” Massachusetts Review 23(2): 226-43.

Stitt, Peter. 1982. “Dark Volumes.” [Review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns.] New York Times Book Review (14 February): 15, 37.

Stuewe, Paul. 1982. [Review of The Man In the Black Coat Turns.] Quill & Quire 48: 39.

Thompson, Keith. 1982. “What Men Really Want.” New Age Journal (7 May): 30-37, 50-51.

Crowder, Dianne Griffin. 1983. “Amazons and Mothers: Monique Wittig, Hélène Cixous and Theories of Women's Writing.” Contemporary Literature 24(2): 117-44.

Fredman, Stephen. 1983. Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. Cambridge, Great Britain: Cambridge University Press.

Holden, Jonathan. 1983. “Postmodern Poetic Form: A Theory.” New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 6(1): 1-22.

Kramer, Lawrence. 1983. “A Sensible Emptiness: Robert Bly and the Poetics of Immanence.” Contemporary Literature 24(4): 448-61.

Miller, Brown. 1983. “Searching for Poetry: Real vs. Fake.” [Review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns.] San Francisco Review of Books (8 July): 22.

Reynolds, Michael S. 1983. [Review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns.] In Magill's Literary Annual 1983, edited by Frank N. Magill. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press.

Breslin, James E. B. 1984. From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-65. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Davis, William V. 1984. “‘In a Low Voice to Someone He is Sure is Listening’: Robert Bly's Recent Poems in Prose.” Midwest Quarterly 25(2): 148-56.

Libby, Anthony. 1984. Mythologies of Nothing: Mystical Death in American Poetry 1940-70. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Nelson, Howard. 1984. Robert Bly: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press.

Peseroff, Joyce. 1984. Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Thompson, Keith. 1984. “Robert Bly on Fathers and Sons.” Esquire (April): 238-39.

Unterecker, John. 1984. “Foreword” to Robert Bly: An Introduction to the Poetry, by Howard Nelson. New York: Columbia University Press.

Brumer, Andy. 1985. “Loving as the Bridge.” [Review of Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.] Poetry Flash 152: 1, 6.

Chappell, Fred. 1985. “Sepia Photographs and Jazz Solos.” [Review of Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.] New York Times Book Review (13 October): 15.

Emery, Edward J. 1985. “Bly's Poetics.” [Letter to the Editor.] New York Times Book Review (17 November): 42.

Harris, Victoria Frenkel. 1985. “Relationship and Change: Text and Context of James Wright's ‘Blue Teal's Mother’ and Robert Bly's ‘With Pale Women in Maryland’.” American Poetry 3(1): 43-56.

Irigarey, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. (Translated by Catherine Porter.) Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Lauter, Estella, and Carol Schreier Rupprecht, editors. 1985. Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-Visions of Jungian Thought. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Lehman, David. 1985. “The Prosaic Principle.” [Review of The Man in the Black Coat Turns.] Partisan Review 52(3): 302-4.

Myers, Jack, and Michael Simms. 1985. Longman Dictionary and Handbook of Poetry. White Plains, N.Y.: Longman.

Stuewe, Paul, 1985. [Review of Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.] Quill & Quire 51: 29.

Sugg, Richard P. 1985. “Robert Bly and the Poetics of Evolutionary Psychology.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 6(1-2): 33-37.

Anonymous. 1986. “Notes on Current Books.” [Review of Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.] Virginia Quarterly Review 62(1): 27.

Dacey, Philip. 1986. “Saint Robert.” [Review of Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.] American Book Review 8: 13-14.

Kakutani, Michiko. 1986. [Review of Selected Poems.] New York Times (3 May): 15.

Peseroff, Joyce. 1986. “Minnesota Transcendentalist.” [Review of Selected Poems.] New York Times Book Review (25 May): 2.

Richman, Robert. 1986. “The Poetry of Robert Bly.” The New Criterion 5(4): 37-46.

Roberson, William H. 1986. Robert Bly: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Metuchen, N. J.: Scarecrow Press.

Smith, Laurel, and Robert E. Taylor. 1986. “Moving with the Deep Image in the Poetry of Robert Bly.” Journal of Mental Imagery 10(2): 113-19.

Stitt, Peter. 1986. “Coherence Through Place in Contemporary American Poetry.” [Review of Selected Poems.] Georgia Review 40(4): 1021-33.

Sugg, Richard P. 1986. Robert Bly. Boston: Twayne.

Ardinger, Richard. 1987. [Review of Selected Poems.] Western American Literature 22(1): 95.

Bliss, Shepherd. 1987. “The Men of the Wound.” In New Men, New Minds: Breaking Male Tradition, edited by Franklin Abbott. Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press.

Gioia, Dana. 1987. “The Successful Career of Robert Bly.” Hudson Review 40(2): 207-23.

Hamill, Sam. 1987. “Lyric, Miserable Lyric (Or: Whose Dog Are You?).” [Review of Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.] American Poetry Review 16(5): 31.

LeClair, Tom. 1987. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Lovelock, J. E. 1987. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. New York: Oxford University Press.

Monroe, Jonathan. 1987. A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Perkins, David. 1987. A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Raksin, Alex. 1987. [Review of Loving a Woman in Two Worlds.] Los Angeles Book Review (22 February): 10.

Young, David. 1987. “The Naturalizing of Surrealism.” [Review of Selected Poems.] Field 36: 90-94.

Davis, William V. 1988. Understanding Robert Bly. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Melnyczuk, Askold. 1988. “Robert Bly” [Review of Selected Poems.] Partisan Review 65(1): 167-71.

Mitchell, Roger. 1988. “Robert Bly and the Trouble with American Poetry.” Ohio Review 42: 86-92.

Harris, Victoria Frenkel. 1989. “Scribe, Inscription, Inscribed: Sexuality in the Poetry of Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich.” In Discontented Discourses: Feminism/Textual Intervention/ Psychoanalysis, edited by Marleen S. Barr and Richard Feldsteins. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Kalaidjian, Walter. 1989. Languages of Liberation: The Social Text in Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rutsala, Vern. 1989. “Déjà Vu: Thoughts on the Fifties and Eighties.” American Poetry Review 18: 29-35.

Abrams, William. 1990. [Review of Iron John: A Book About Men.] Library Journal (15 November): 83.

Appelbaum, David. 1990. “Not at Home: The Search for the Father.” Parabola 15(3): 98-104, 124-25.

Brumer, Andy. 1990. “Bly looks into the heart of man.” [Review of Iron John: A Book About Men.] Los Angeles Daily News (30 December): 29.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1990. “Bring on the Hairy Mentor.” [Review of Iron John: A Book About Men.] New York Times Book Review (9 December): 15-16.

Gross, Daniel. 1990. “The Gender Rap.” New Republic (16 April): 11-14.

Harris, Victoria Frenkel. 1990. “‘Walking Swiftly’ with Freedom: Robert Bly's Prose Poems.” American Poetry 7(2): 13-30.

———. 1990a. “A Systems Approach to Robert Bly's This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years. In Germany and German Thought in American Literature and Cultural Criticism: Proceedings of the German-American Conference in Paderborn, May 16-18, 1990, edited by Peter Freese. Essen, Germany: Die Blaue Eule: 433-53.

Moore, Robert, and Douglas Gillette. 1990. King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. New York: HarperSanFrancisco.

Wagenheim, Jeff. 1990. “The Secret Life of Men.” New Age Journal (October): 40-45, 106-13.

Allen, Charlotte. 1991. “The Little Prince.” [Review of Iron John: A Book About Men.] Commentary 91(5): 58-60.

Appelo, Tim. 1991. “The Bly Guys.” Entertainment Weekly (19 April): 23-24.

Eckhoff, Sally S. 1991. [Review of Iron John: A Book About Men.] Voice Literary Supplement 92: 8.

Faludi, Susan. 1991. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York: Crown.

Garvey, Michael O. 1991. [Review of Iron John: A Book About Men.] Books & Religion 18: 5.

Kuusisto, Stephen. 1991. “Robert Bly's Iron John and the New ‘Lawrentian’ Man.” Seneca Review 21(1): 77-86.

Lammon, Martin. 1991. “A Sustained Raid into Modern Life: The Critical Commentary of Robert Bly, 1958-1986.” Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio University.

———. 1991a. “A Sustained Raid into Modern Life: The Critical Commentary of Robert Bly, 1958-1986.” Dissertation Abstracts International 52(5): 1743-44.

Levine, Art. 1991. “Masculinity's Champion.” U.S. News & World Report (8 April): 61-62.

Morrison, Blake. 1991. [Review of Iron John: A Book About Men.] Times Literary Supplement (27 September): 36.

Morrow, Lance. 1991. “The Child Is Father of the Man.” Time (19 August): 52-54.

Neafsey, James. 1991. “Real Quiche.” [Review of Iron John: A Book About Men.] Commonweal (3 May): 299.

Schmidt, Stephen A. 1991. “Recovering the Wild Man.” Christian Century (29 May-5 June): 591-93.

Smith, R. W. 1991. [Review of Iron John: A Book About Men.] Choice 28(7): 1234.

Solotaroff, Ted. 1991. “Captain Bly.” Nation (9 September): 270-74.

Tacey, David J. 1991. “Attacking Patriarchy, Redeeming Masculinity.” San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal 10: 25-41.

Warren, Catherine. 1991. “Myths Make the Man.” [Review of Iron John: A Book About Men.] New Statesman and Society (27 September): 54.

Allen, Danielle. 1992. [Review of What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?] National Review 44(14): 50.

Anonymous. 1992. [Review of What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?] Publishers Weekly 239: 17.

———. 1992a. “Where Are Women and Men Today? Robert Bly and Deborah Tannen in Conversation.” New Age Journal (February): 28-33, 92-97.

Briggs, Joe Bob. 1992. “Get in Touch With Your Ancient Spear: A Manly Seminar With Iron Joe Bob.” New York Times Book Review (31 May): 44-45.

Davis, William V. 1992. Critical Essays on Robert Bly. New York: G. K. Hall.

———. 1992a. “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last.” In Masterplots II: Poetry, edited by Frank N. Magill. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press.

———. 1992b. “Robert Bly.” In Critical Survey of Poetry: English Language Series, revised edition, edited by Frank N. Magill. Pasadena: Calif.: Salem Press.

Dodd, Wayne. 1992. “Back to the Snowy Fields.” In Critical Essays on Robert Bly, edited by William V. Davis. New York: G. K. Hall.

Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. 1992. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York: Ballantine.

Galin, Saul. 1992. “The Third Male.” In Walking Swiftly: Writings & Images on the Occasion of Robert Bly's 65th Birthday, edited by Thomas R. Smith. St. Paul, Minn.: Ally Press.

Hall, Donald. 1992. “Young Bly.” In Critical Essays on Robert Bly, edited by William V. Davis. New York: G. K. Hall.

Hansen, Tom. 1992. “Robert Bly's Iron John.” Literary Review 35(3): 415-18.

Harris Victoria Frenkel. 1992. The Incorporative Consciousness of Robert Bly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

——— 1992a. “Received from Robert Bly: Two Lessons and a Message.” In Walking Swiftly: Writings & Images on the Occasion of Robert Bly's 65^th Birthday, edited by Thomas R. Smith. St. Paul, Minn.: Ally Press.

Johnson, Diane. 1992. “Something for the Boys.” [Review of Iron John: A Book About Men.] New York Review of Books (16 January): 13-17.

Johnston, Jill. 1992. “Why Iron John Is No Gift to Women.” New York Times Book Review (23 February): 1, 28-31, 33.

Kimmel, Michael S. 1992. “Reading Men: Men, Masculinity, and Publishing.” Contemporary Sociology 21(2): 162-71.

Moore, Robert L. 1992. “Robert Bly and True Greatness: Some Musings from the Study of Leadership in Human Culture.” In Walking Swiftly: Writings & Images on the Occasion of Robert Bly's 65th Birthday, edited by Thomas R. Smith. St. Paul, Minn.: Ally Press.

Myers, George, Jr. 1992. “‘Iron John’: An Interview with Robert Bly.” Literary Review 35(3): 408-14.

Poole, Francis. 1992. [Review of What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?] Library Journal (1 June): 10.

Rehder, Robert. 1992. “Which Way to the Future?” In Critical Essays On Robert Bly, edited by William V. Davis. New York: G. K. Hall.

Ross, Andrew. 1992. “Wet, Dark, and Low, Eco-Man Evolves from Eco-Woman.” Boundary 2 19(2): 205-32.

Seaman, Donna. 1992. [Review of What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?] Booklist (1 May): 17.

Seyfarth, Susan. 1992. “Arnold Schwarzenegger and Iron John: Predator to Protector.” Studies in Popular Culture 15(1): 75-81.

Smith, Thomas R., editor. 1992. Walking Swiftly: Writings & Images on the Occasion of Robert Bly's 65^th Birthday. St. Paul, Minn.: Ally Press.

Stitt, Peter. 1992. “The Startling Journeys of Robert Bly.” In Critical Essays on Robert Bly, edited by William V. Davis. New York: G. K. Hall.

True, Michael. 1992. “Celebrating Robert Bly, but Taking Him to Task as Well.” In Walking Swiftly: Writings & Images on the Occasion of Robert Bly's 65^th Birthday, edited by Thomas R. Smith. St. Paul, Minn.: Ally Press.

Udovitch, Mim. 1992. [Interview with Robert Bly.] Mirabelle (October): 36.

Ventura, Michael. 1992. “An Open Letter to Robert Bly on His Sixty-fifth Birthday.” In Walking Swiftly: Writings & Images on the Occasion of Robert Bly's 65th Birthday, edited by Thomas R. Smith. St. Paul, Minn.: Ally Press.

Weissman, Judith. 1992. “A Woman's View of Iron John.” In Walking Swiftly: Writings & Images on the Occasion of Robert Bly's 65^th Birthday, edited by Thomas R. Smith. St. Paul, Minn.: Ally Press.

Ziegenhals, Gretchen E. 1992. “Hairy Christians for Bly.” The Christian Century (29 July-5 August): 700-2.

Zipes, Jack. 1992. “Spreading Myths about Fairy Tales: A Critical Commentary on Robert Bly's Iron John.” New German Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies 55: 3-19.

Chang, Leslie C. 1993. [Review of What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?] Harvard Review 3: 187-88.

Heller, Scott. 1993. “Disconcerted by the ‘Iron John’ Movement, Many Scholars Call It Simplistic.” Chronicle of Higher Education (3 February): A8.

Howard, Jerry, and Jeff Wagenheim. 1993. “Men on Midlife: Straight Talk About Women, Power, Money, God, and the Myth of the Midlife Crisis.” New Age Journal (July/August): 53, 55-56.

Kakutani, Michiko. 1993. “Beyond Iron John? How About Iron Jane?” New York Times (27 August): C1, C28.

Lense, Edward. 1993. “A Voice for the Wild Man: Robert Bly and the Rhetoric of Public Poetry.” AWP Chronicle 26(2): 17-20.

Wiliamson, Marianne. 1993. A Woman's Worth. New York: Random House.