Image: Poetaster Robert Bly striking one of his melodramatic poses
Redefining the Image into Nothingness
The image is one of the most important literary devices—not only for poetry but for all forms of discourse. Poetaster Robert Bly does the device a great disservice by redefining it out of existence. Bly and his ilk have damaged the reputation and impact of the great art of poetry.
The Importance of the Image in Language
In Robert Bly’s attempted critical prose ramblings titled American Poetry: Wilderness and Domesticity [1], the quintessential poetaster and pobiz sacred cow defines the literary device known as “image”:
An image and a picture differ, in that the image being the natural speech of the imagination, cannot be drawn from or inserted back into the natural world.
Bly seems to be focusing entirely on visual imagery, as he defines “image” against “picture”; imagery, however, includes specific language that may appeal to any of the five senses, not just sight. An example of the image including the senses of sound and smell in addition to sight is Robert Browning’s “Meeting at Night”:
The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!
The poem begins and ends steeped in imagery [2]—mostly visual, but two lines contain images that appeal to sight, sound, and smell: “A tap at the pane (visual/auditory), the quick sharp scratch (auditory) / And blue spurt of a lighted match (olfactory).”
These lines portray a lover tapping at the window of his beloved: readers/listeners can see him and hear his tapping.
The lover then strikes a match, and readers/listeners can hear the match head scraping against some rough object, they can visualize the flame, and they can also smell the sulfur from the match as it bursts into flame.
But according to Bly these images are not images at all, they are merely pictures. They all do appear in nature; they all are retained in the memory so that after re-encountering them, the reader/listener can grasp the scene that the lover is experiencing in the poem.
Imagination and Memory
As the poet’s audience experiences the poem, they have, indeed, used their imaginations to help them see, hear, and smell these Brownian images—not only imagination but also memory.
Readers/listeners of Browning’s “Meeting at Night” must be able to remember the smell of a match and the sound of a tap on a windowpane, in order to be able to grasp the drama that Browning has created.
Is this portrayal simply “picturism” because our grasp of it “can be drawn from [and] inserted back into the natural world”? Imagination and memory work together in our understanding of any text.
The memory consists of information that is in the memory repository (the subconscious, often misconstrued as “the unconscious”), while the imagination works at connecting information gathered from experience, feelings, and thoughts, all of which are represented by language.
If our memory and imagination were not capable of acting on language this way, we would not be able to understand any text.
We cannot understand a language we have not learned, because words of the foreign language are not stored in our memory; the imagination has nothing to which it can connect the unknown words.
If, however, an image is, as Bly defines it, “the natural speech of the imagination” but “cannot be drawn from or inserted back into the natural world,” then how can we ever understand the meaning of the words expressing the image?
If the imagination is a place where sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch do not hold those things that comprise the “natural world,” then what is within the purview of the imagination?
Of course, there are connections that the memory and imagination can make that are on their face absurd, surreal, or simply false.
But those connections are not the stuff of poetry or any art, unless they are being used in the art for refutation against counterfeiting.
Such phenomena may also comprise the initial writing exercises known as brain-storming or pre-writing, but if they are left in an unformed, unpolished state, they will remain incommunicable at best and ugly at worst.
Image vs Picture
Bly has offered for comparison the following phrases, one he considers an image and one he considers a picture. His example of an image is Bonnefoy’s “interior sea lighted by turning eagles,” which he contrasts with Pound’s “Petals on a wet black bough.”
According to Bly, Bonnefoy’s phrase is not taken from nature and cannot be inserted back into the natural world, while Pound’s can be. Keep in mind that Bly has called for poets to “ask the unconscious . . . to enter the poem and contribute a few images that we may not fully understand.”
Misconstruing “unconscious” for “subconscious,” Bly is begging for absurdity. He wishes to experience gibberish phrases, for that is all they can ever be, if not based on a language that is common to us all.
And is it really true that Bonnefoy’s phrase is not taken from nature and cannot be inserted back into the natural world?
An “interior sea” obviously represents metaphorically the mind (and possibly the soul), while the “turning eagles” are certain thoughts that are illuminating the surface of that sea.
If the components of that phrase (the content words)—”sea,” “lighted,” “eagles”—appeared nowhere in nature but only in the subconscious of the poet, they would not be intelligible to anyone conversant in the English language.
Bly is skirting the real issue of language, attempting to explain the unexplainable or perhaps by simply remaining unaware of the distinction between the phenomenon of what is effable and what is ineffable.
The ineffable—that is, the world beyond the physical level of being—is not explainable in worldly language. (This fact remains the foundation on which atheism is built.)
Therefore, the poetry devices of metaphor, simile, image, and often personification are employed to make that valiant attempt to communicate what exists and what is happening on that ineffable level of being.
Bly likely employs vagueness and skirting because his secularism has overtaken his ability to vouchsafe that a spiritual level of existence is real. His pedestrian thinking keeps him focused on a kind of never-never land beyond human language.
He seems to be unable to comprehend that the ineffable cannot be described without metaphors, images, and other poetic devices. Two examples of Bly’s own so-called images further demonstrate the poverty of his image vs picture claims.
In his piece titled “Driving Toward Lac Qui Parle River,” he concocts the lines: “water kneeling in the moonlight” and “The lamplight falls on all fours in the grass.” The absurdity of personified water going down on its knees is simply one of the nonsense creations that upon further consideration could find a better phrasing.
And making an animal of lamplight screams out, “look at me, I’m saying something totally original.” With both lines, the scribbler is merely “counterfeiting.” He has nothing to say and so he knows it matters not one whit how he does not say it.
His claim that he wants the unconscious “to enter the poem and contribute a few images that we may not fully understand” remains just one silly way of covering obfuscation and disingenuousness. If we do not understand the “images,” how can the poem communicate?
Today’s Poetry Is without the Image?
While Bly’s definition of the image as something that cannot be drawn from or returned to the natural world is absurd, so is his claim, “The poetry we have now is a poetry without the image.”
This statement is false, not only false but impossible, as private tutor Kerry Kiefer [3] has opined, after being asked the question, “[are] there any poems with no imagery in them that are good?”:
Poetry relies heavily upon imagery, and there is no instance of any poem of which I am aware that lacks imagery altogether.
Your question might be answered more satisfactorily by a linguist: one who studies the underlying principles of language could tell you more exactly why it is impossible for human beings to communicate without imagery. I just instinctively know it is impossible.
Here are a few examples of contemporary poems that definitely are not without the image:
- Linda Pastan’s “The Cossacks”: “those are hoofbeats / on the frosty autumn air”
- Ted Kooser’s “Dishwater”: “a bridge that leaps from her hot red hands / and hangs there shining for fifty years / over the mystified chickens”
- Donald Hall’s “The Painted Bed”: “Grisly, foul, and terrific / is the speech of bones.”
These images and all the many poems that employ imagery testify to the false Bly claim that today’s poetry is imageless. However, the Bly defined image does not and cannot appear in poetry without its concomitant clash with understanding and appreciation.
If the poetaster had claimed that the image according to this Blyian definition does not exist, he would be spot on. Because his own absurd examples do not exist as poetry but mere debris of language twaddle. Basically, the impossibility of making a image according the Bly’s definition remains fact.
Counterfeiting
In his American Poetry: Wilderness and Domesticity, Bly assaults the work of the poet Robert Lowell, particularly Lowell’s For the Union Dead.
(Note: The following shows Bly’s sloppiness in his writing. He begins his rant in this chapter titled “Robert Lowell’s Bankruptcy” by misconfiguring T. S. Eliot’s title “The Waste Land” as The Wasteland. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is a fairly long poem 433 lines, but standing alone it is not a book-length poem requiring italics, plus waste and land are separate words.)
Without identifying the poem from which he has taken it, Bly quotes the following Lowell passage which he particularly despises, calling it “coarse and ugly” and “unimaginative”:
Horrible the connoisseur tyrant’s querulous strut;
an acorn dances in a girdle of green oak leaves
up the steps of the scaffold to the block,
square bastard of an oak
Instead of explaining why this passage is “coarse and ugly” and “unimaginative,” Bly merely makes a further unsubstantiated assertion:
[Lowell] is counterfeiting intellectual energy, pretending to be saying passionate things about tyrants and hangings, but in fact he gives only a series of violent words set next to each other; the indignation is ersatz, and the passage means nothing at all.
The passage taken out of context makes it easy to target for claiming meaninglessness. Meaning of specific passages often depends upon what went before and after the passage itself.
(For readers who wish to experience the entire poem from which Bly has excerpted the above quotation, please visit “Lady Ralegh’s Lament” in Life Studies and For the Union Dead at Google Books.)
The claim of “counterfeiting intellectual energy” is itself a pretense about saying something meaningful: what does “intellectual energy” mean? As structured, Bly seems to be saying that “intellectual energy” is “saying passionate things.”
But again without elucidation, according to Bly, Lowell is merely faking his saying of “passionate things.”
And then Bly makes a completely false statement when he asserts that “only a series of violent words set next to each other.”
Such a claim means that there is a catalogue or list of words without connecting text. Clearly, no such list exists in that passage. And how Bly assumes “indignation” remains unexplained.
And that that “indignation” is “ersatz” just offers further evidence of Bly’s own counterfeiting at offering a criticism of the passage.
That collection of prose ramblings demonstrates the bankruptcy of Bly’s own critical vision, and his chapter on Lowell is one of the most revealing; the exact weaknesses for which Bly criticizes Lowell attach only to Bly in his poetry as well as he criticism.
Quite possibly, Bly reveals the reason that he has been able to “counterfeit” a career in poetry, when he says, “. . . for American readers are so far from standing at the center of themselves that they can’t tell when a man is counterfeiting and when he isn’t” (my emphasis).
Is this, perhaps, an admission regarding his own art?
If an artist espouses such a derogatory notion about his audience, what is there to keep him honest? What does this imply about the integrity of his own art?
By the time Bly wrote these vacuous pieces of literary criticism, he had become a sacred cow in the world of poetry. His reputation was set so that critics shied away from countering anything Bly set down in writing.
Redefining the Image into Nothingness
In order to claim that images are not images but pictures and that there are no images in today’s poetry, Bly has concocted an impossible, unworkable, and totally fraudulent definition of “image.”
To perpetuate such a gross literary scam upon the already destitute literary world is, indeed, a travesty.
According to Kevin Bushell [4], “Such vague and metaphorical theoretical statements are characteristic of Bly, who seems reluctant to speak about technique in conventional terms.”
According to Robert Richman, “Bly provided the generation of poets coming of age in the Seventies with plenty of examples of anti-poetic poetry to accompany his anti-critical rhetoric” [5].
It is little wonder that poetry possesses little heft in the 21st century, after the drubbing it has taken at the hands of modernists, postmodernists, and outright scam artists like Robert Bly and his ilk in the 20th century.
Sources
[1] Robert Bly. American Poetry: Wilderness and Domesticity. HarperPerennial Edition. 1991. Print.
[2] Editors. “What Is Imagery in Literature?” TutorialsPoint. Accessed April 11, 2023.
[3] Kerry Kiefer. “[are] there any poems with no imagery in them that are good?” Quora. Accessed April 11, 2023.
[4], Kevin Bushell. “Leaping Into the Unknown: The Poetics of Robert Bly’s Deep Image.” Modern American Poetry. Accessed April 11, 2023.
[5] Robert Richman. “The Poetry of Robert Bly.” The New Criterion. December 1986.
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