Verses of Despair (Robert Bly’s Poetics between Idealism and Naturalism)

The Vietnam War generated a major outpouring of American antiwar poetry that served as a powerful medium of expressing dissent and disillusionment with the war. One of many American poets who extensively contributed to the antiwar poetry movement during the war is Robert Bly. While Bly’s poetics are often appreciated for their revolutionary fervor, there exists a subtle and concealed naturalist streak in his poetry that deserves further exploration. The scholarly marginalization of such an aspect of his literary legacy undermines the richness and complexity of Bly’s poetic vision. This paper seeks to identify moments of rupture that challenge Bly’s idealized poetics of antiwar stance, moments that strike a naturalistic chord that capitalizes on the pessimistic belief that the world and politics are outside of one’s own control. Through a naturalistic theoretical framework, the paper looks closely at two of Bly’s lesser-known poems: “The World is a Confusion of Three Worlds” (1960) and “The Approaching War” (2003), written respectively in reference to the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. The significance of this study lies in deepening our understanding of the breadth and width of Bly’s poetics and politics, illustrating the potential and limitation of his antiwar stance and rhetoric. It also helps rectify the prevailing misconception that naturalism is irrelevant in the late twentieth century’s evolving literary styles of expression.