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 romantics, and the Spanish-language authors Lorca, Neruda, Valiejo, Jimenez, and Machado) are “wild” and “inward,” moving from image to image along “arcs of association” and plunging so far into their souls that they tap universal truths and achieve mystery, “passionate spontaneity,” and “spiritual intensity.”
Alas, the bits of verse that Bly singles out for approval tend to be textbook examples of raw effusion, political invective, or—most commonly—surrealistic juxtaposition. (Lorca: “One day/ The horses will live in the saloons/ And the outraged ants/ Will throw themselves on the yellow skies that have taken refuge in the eyes of cows.”) And Ely’s arguments are less than convincing. He rejects the use of received forms by American poets on geographical