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

In the following essay, Molesworth surveys Bly's poetic style, ideas, influences, political poetry, pastorals, prose-poems, and finally his long, visionary work Sleepers Joining Hands.

I

Since Silence in the Snowy Fields appeared over ten years ago, Robert Bly has steadily accumulated a poetry of secrecy and exultation, that most difficult of combinations. While excoriating the destructiveness of false public values, he insists on a silencing solitude as the primary poetic discipline. Diving into the stillest mythic recesses, he resurfaces with thrashing energy, intensely unwilling to settle for any but the most blinding light. His body of work is relatively small—certainly the smallest of those others of his generation such as Levertov, Snyder, and Ashbery—and this sharpens the sense of a patient accumulation. In describing his...