SOURCE: Sugg, Richard P. “The Poetics of the New Imagination: Silence in the Snowy Fields.” In Robert Bly, pp. 18-35. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.

In the following essay, Sugg examines Bly's early poetic mode, his use and conception of imagery, and his principal themes, particularly those of self-discovery and the development of the soul.

While he was writing for and editing the Fifties, Bly was publishing his own poetry elsewhere, both in journals and anthologies. But in 1962 his career as an important new American poet properly begins, with the publication of two books. The first, The Lion's Tail and Eyes: Poems Written Out of Laziness and Silence,¹ was a joint collection of poems by Bly, James Wright, and William Duffy. The second was Bly's first book, Silence in the Snowy Fields,² published by Wesleyan University Press in what was then considered “the most distinguished American poetry series.”³ The books...