Robert Bly has culled these twenty-six essays and one interview from three decades of his poetry criticism, much of it originally published in his journal The Fifties (later called The Sixties and The Seventies). They are largely feisty, “calculated to draw blood from the old King”—the “old King” being “the conservative mindset inherited from Eliot and Pound, and the triumphant flatness inherited from Descartes and Locke.” To Bly, who feels that English-language poetry has been on the skids since Beowulf, bad verse is not merely conservative and flat but “outward,” produced by “the workaday conscious mind[s]” of domesticated middle-class types (Bly draws examples from most of the celebrated American poets of this century); by contrast, good poets (such as Blake, Whitman, Yeats, most of the French symbolists and German...

 

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