Bly has touched and often irritated virtually every poet and every issue in contemporary poetry in at least one of his roles: editor, satirist, theorizer, organizer, translator, regionalist, prizewinner, and iconoclast. One might well say, as Eliot said of Pound and Chinese poetry, that Bly has invented South American poetry for our time. No literary history of the last twenty years would be complete without reference to Bly's magazine, The Sixties. And few social aestheticians would ignore Bly's acceptance speech at the 1968 National Book Awards ceremony: "I know I am speaking for many, many American poets when I ask this question: since we are murdering a culture in Vietnam at least as fine as our own, have we the right to congratulate ourselves on our cultural magnificence? Isn't that out of place?"

As a critic and as a poetic theorist, Bly has contributed much to the recent shift...