Robert Bly, This Tree Will Be Here For A Thousand Years

William V. Davis (Baylor University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1979

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection

Resources

In his preface to This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (1979, 2nd edition, with a major revision, in 1992), Robert Bly relates the poems in this book to those in his first book, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962). These “two books make one book”, Bly says, and both “try to achieve 'two presences'.” Bly explains what he means by this by saying that he has attempted to write poems “where the inner and outer merge without a seam”. This is clearly a variation on the Boehmean dichotomy so important to the lyrics of Silence, but in This Tree Bly defines his practice somewhat differently and in much greater detail. Each of the poems in This Tree, Bly says, “contains an instant . . . when I…

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493 words

Citation: Davis, William V.. "This Tree Will Be Here For A Thousand Years". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 October 2001 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8296, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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