摘 要

20世纪60年代以来当代美国政治诗歌开始进入读者的视线，许多诗人运用诗歌反对越战和社会上其他的不公现象，如性别歧视和种族歧视。罗伯特·勃莱是美国政治诗坛的代表，他的政治诗集《身体周围的光》在1968年获得美国国家图书奖，他也因此成为了近年来美国政治诗歌的标杆。国内学者大多从心理学的角度研究他的田园诗，以及研究他诗歌与中国古典诗歌的关联，很少专门研究他的政治诗歌。本文通过分析其政治诗歌中自然意象，分析其在结构和内容上的特征，寻找他政治诗歌的独特魅力。勃莱政治诗歌中的自然意象具有两方面特色：理智的结构和带有美国特色的直觉想象。本文试图通过关注罗伯特·勃莱的自然意象来研究他的政治诗歌，希望能为进一步研究勃莱和他的诗歌提供一些新的思路。

关键词：政治诗歌；意象；自然

Abstract

Contemporary American political poetry came into being in the 1960s when a plenty of poets started writing to fight against the Vietnam War and some other social injustice such as sexism and racism. Robert Bly, whose collection of political poems the Light Around the Body won the National Book Award in 1968, became the benchmark of the recent American political poetry. Scholars at home just focus their research on the poet’s pastoral poetry from the perspective of psychology and study the connection between his poetry and Chinese classical poetry. However, they rarely analyze his political poetry. In this paper the images about nature in Bly’s political poems are taken into the subtle analysis in order to study his political poetry. The author tries to analyze the characteristics of its structure and content, looking for the unique charm of his political poetry. The images about nature in his political poetry are mainly characterized by the intellectual construction and the poet’s intuitive imagination with American traits. This paper attempts to study the images about nature in his political poetry, hoping to provide some new ways for the further study of Robert Bly and his poetry.

Key Words: Political poetry; images; nature

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Robert Bly and his works 1

1.2 Literature review 2

1.3 Structure of the paper 5

2 Bly’s Poetics of Political Poetry 5

2.1 Bly’s view on political poetry 5

2.2 Bly’s images in his political poems 7

3 Images about Nature in Bly’s Political Poetry 9

3.1 The intellectual structure of images about nature 9

3.2 American features of images about nature 14

4 Conclusion 23

References 24

Acknowledgements 25

Images About Nature in Robert Bly’s Political Poems

Introduction

Robert Bly plays manifold roles such as the poet, the translator, the critic, the storyteller, the pamphleteer, and also the leader of the Expressive Men's Movement as he called. Over the decades of his strenuous and laborious work, he has successfully engraved profound influence on American poetry in which his critical opinion on Imagism undeniably urges an upward switch of his generation. He points out that Formalism and Imagism defy the private imagination growing in the inside world and thus narrow poetry into the outside world. Bly's poetry tries to evoke readers’ intimacy of mental activity by means of his subjective images arousing the unconscious and thus striking a responsive chord in his/her conscious. He addresses the movement from unconscious to conscious as “leaping” (Bly, 1967, p.84). It is the way to achieve harmony in one’s mind by virtue of the union of the physical and the psychic. Poetry, according to him, should extend the reader’s eyesight to a broader view than what he/she can see in reality. It should echo in one’s psyche and surpass rationality so as to attain the wholeness. Besides, his candid worry about man’s psyche also draws scholars’ attention.

Robert Bly and his works

Robert Bly was born in West Minnesota in 1926, a farmer’s son. Before he attended in St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he was enlisted in Nary in 1944. Then he continued his study in Harvard and received his M.A. from the University of Iowa in 1956. He was awarded a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway when he found out that numerous important poets including Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl and Harry Martinson were absent in American literary purview. Therefore, he started a literary magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties and The Seventies) with aim to introduce these poets and also explicate his own poetics. In 1962, he published his first poetry collection Silence in the Snowy Fields, an assemblage of his poetic effort on the practice of linking the subjectivity and the objectivity, and it swept the stale constraint in American poetry at that time immediately. His second collection the Light around the Body won the National Book Award in 1967, an anti-Vietnam book in which he explored an apt appeal for humanity in reality under the circumstance that discrimination, destitution, conflict, and violence wreaked havoc in the United States. His conviction for the Vietnam War continued into the 1973 Sleepers joining hands and then Bly turned further to the psychological dilemma of the masses, his best-seller Iron John and his social activities as the Great Mother and the Man’s Movement illuminating his intense interest in the introspection of the public. From then on, Bly is calmer and more insightful in poetry and seems to return to his probation to the mysterious integrity of psyche and objectivity. He rendered glorious poems in different forms such as Ghazal and prose poems and did a great contribution to the variety of American poetry. In 2001, Bly published The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War, a collection of some poems written during the Vietnam War and some recent poems as a clarity against the Iraq War.

Literature review

Both domestic and foreign scholars have made extensive researches on Robert Bly and his poems. By January 10th, 2020, through authoritative databases such as CNKI, JSTOR, Springer Link Journals, and so on, the author of this paper found that there are more than 100 articles，Master’s theses and doctoral dissertations about Bly and his poems.

The study at home about Bly and his poems centers mostly on Bly’s demonstration of imagist poetry, his acceptance and adaption of Chinese cultural facets such as Taoism and Chinese classical poetry, and textual analysis of his pastoral poems, such as “Analysis of Robert Bly’s Deep Images and His Cultural Propositions from the Poem ‘Fishing on a Lake at Night’” (Ni, 2016), “China Classical Poetry elements in Robert Bly’s Poetry” (Wang, 2017), “The Marriage of Two American Postmodern Poets and Chinese Classical Poetry” (Kang,2018), and “The American Deep Image Accepts Chinese Classical Poetry” (Niu,2019). His political poetry and political advocacy are merely mentioned and analyzed: “Man’s Malignant Aggression in Robert Bly’s Political Poetry” (Peng, 2018)and several papers and an anthology by Xiao Xiaojun such as “A Poem Deep into the Soul -- Analysis of Robert Bly's Masterpiece ‘Counting the Small Bones’” (Xiao, 2006) and “Poetry Revolution and Poetry School: One Man's Editorial Work” (Xiao, 2017) are published. Peng’s thesis particularly centers on man’s malignant aggression through analyzing sadism, necrophilia, and the teeth mother in Bly’s political poems, and Xiao briefly introduces Bly’s concern about and theory of political poetry, while these two do not specialize in the practical relation between Bly’s imagism and political poetry.

Foreign researches on Bly’s poetry are considerable and systematic, swathing numerous aspects such as the analysis of Bly’s works with respect to Bohemianism and Deep Imagism, for example, the first and the second chapter of Victoria Frenkel Harris’s The Incorporative conscious of Robert Bly (Harris,1992); criticism on his political poems such as “Hurt into Poetry: The Political Verses of Seamus Heaney and Robert Bly” by Jeffery Alan Triggs (Triggs, 1992); myth criticism with an emphasis on a psychological approach, taking Richard Karman Gilbert’s “Revisiting the Psychology of Men: Robert Bly and the Mytho-Poetic Movement” (Gilbert, 1992) as an example; analysis of Bly’s application of prose poems; and criticism on Bly’s theory of male-female conscious.

In terms of Bly’s political poetry, he himself considered that a true political poem was not simply propaganda, and the success of political poetry lies in its linguistic objects, or more specifically, “images” that can “leap up” into the psyche (Bly, 1967, p84). American critics find Bly ambitious in his political poetry, his ironic verse leading to a deep voice that comes from his concern about the psyche of the nation. Criticism of Bly’s political poetry derives from different angles, and most critics share the same interest in his endeavor to link his political poetry and his dissection of national psychological plight. In “Thrashing in the Depths: The Poetry of Robert Bly”, Charles Molesworth argues that in Bly’s political poems, “he alleges that the grossest forms of false conscious are necessary for such inhumanity to occur” (Molesworth, 1975, p100), and the knowledge of the world in the unconscious is essential and necessary for reviving humanity. Some scholars also analyze the public influence of his political poetry and the effectiveness of his personal rhetoric. Jeffery Alan Triggs compares the political poetry of Bly and Heaney and doubts that Bly’s “isolated images do not make for effective discourse in a political poem” and his “simple contrast does not necessarily create coherence” (Triggs, 1992, p.9). Except, Michael Dowdy classifies Bly’s political poems into those “of equivocal agency”, and he also argues that the rhetoric strategies of this type “evince a greater concern for imaginative visions that do not fit neatly into succinct messages or political position”, (Dowdy, 2007, p114), the intuition and the implication of these visions impelling us to act in real life.

Political matters did not receive much attention from American poets till the 1930s, except that Walt Whitman began positively involving politics in his poetry when the Civil War started, during which time he wrote vehement political poems in defense of democracy and thus empowered his magnum opus Leaves of Grass (Whitman, 2005) with enormous humanism. Although some of his poems are imbibed with ideas of practical politics, Whitman does not endeavor to disguise his republic advocacy or his political propaganda as decent poems, more often than not, he is partial to the spirit, the personal life, and the daily politics. His political poems constitute an inextricable part of his poetry. After Whitman, political poetry had loomed for decades when the mainstream of American poetry still accredited poems of pastoralism and of introspection as the real poems.

After the American Civil War, political poetry was more likely used as a tool in social discourse. Many black poets expressed their anger against the injustice and ill-treatment of the black people in their poems, among whom Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes distinguish themselves with exceptional artistic accomplishments. The outspoken intention in their poetry is riposted later by American formalists. According to the New Criticism, poems that serve the political purpose basically deviate from the aesthetic value and therefore are bad poems. Cleanth Brooks criticized political poetry abuses sentimentality and remains only irony and coherence. He clearly reproached American Proletarian poetry in the 1920s and 1930s for their speaking in a common language and showing overtly provocative. These poets such as Kenneth Fearing, Edwin Rolfe, Muriel Rukeyser write for the working-class and adapt lucid sociolect, therefore confront American formalists’ tendency to making poetry elitist and esoteric (Brooks, 1976). In the 1930s, Ezra Pound, the precursor of American modern poetry, was still endeavoring to broaden his Cantons. Political judgement wrought deeply influence in the cantons of the 1930s and 1940s, many themes of history and politics circulating in Pound’s obscure, fragmented and incoherent stanzas. After him, American political poetry awakening during WWI and WWII was soon sunk in silence by the New criticism.

The New Critical assumption had dominated American literary institutions for a generation until the emergence of politicized literary criticism in the 1960s. With novel theories from other aspects invading American literature and informing scholars of different perspectives, the political dimension of literary studies could be neglected no longer. Post-Marxism, modern linguistic study, and the striking feminist criticism convincingly find the inextricability of the politics and literature. Besides, The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War also stirred up American poets’ agitation and their desire for political poetry. Poets like Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov and Robert Bly wrote excellent political poems against the Vietnam War. The renewal political poetry is diversified and, in a way, accepted and appreciated by contemporary American literary critics.

Structure of the paper

This paper consists of four parts. The first part introduces Robert Bly and his works, literature review including Bly and the brief history of American political poetry. The second part expounds Bly’s poetics of political poetry which consists of two sections: his view on political poetry and his images in political poetry. The third part is the exposition of images about nature in Bly's political poetry from the perspectives of its intellectual structure and American features of the content. The fourth part is the conclusion, which summarizes the main points of this paper.

Bly’s Poetics of Political Poetry

Some western scholars persist that politics and poetry are basically diametrical cultural parts that cannot be convivially fused. Politics, in a sense, responds to the public events and social phenomenon, while poetry is more obviously considered an aesthetic of language, a private exploration of the universal truth. As Bly said, “Many poets say flatly—and proudly— that they are ‘not political’” (Bly, 1967, p.82). This tradition is somehow indebted to the puritan tradition and American romanticism, the transcendentalist movement, and symbolic aesthetics weighting more emphasis on individual feelings and meditative solitude insofar as to omit the politics. If a poet tries to find the latent beauty, to discover the ambiguous truth, then he/she must escape from the outward complexity and explore his/her inward pureness. The political is assumingly suffused with the complicated fuss and is not related to poetry. It explains the rightfulness of poets avoiding politics.