'A Wrong Turning in American Poetry' is an essay by United States poet Robert Bly which was first published in '' Choice'' magazine in

1963 Events January * January 1 – Bogle–Chandler case: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation scientist Dr. Gilbert Bogle and Mrs. Margaret Chandler are found dead (presumed poisoned), in bushland near the Lane Cov ...

and collected in ''American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity.'' It has subsequently been anthologized in ''Twentieth-Century American Poetics''.edited by Dana Gioia, David Mason, and Meg Schoerke In the essay, Bly found all Modern and contemporary American verse (up until he was writing his essay in 1963) to be lacking in

spirituality The meaning of ''spirituality'' has developed and expanded over time, and various meanings can be found alongside each other. Traditionally, spirituality referred to a religious process of re-formation which "aims to recover the original shape o ...

and what he termed "inwardness." He also argued that the vast majority of American poets were cut off from the unconscious mind, that their verse was prosaic and lacked "imagination," and that they viewed the world in

materialistic Materialism is the view that the universe consists only of organized matter and energy. Materialism or materialist may also refer to: * Economic materialism, the desire to accumulate material goods * Christian materialism, the combination of Chris ...

, strictly intellectual, and overly objective, "impersonal" terms. Bly made his argument by comparing examples of verse by European and South American poets and some medieval Arabic poems (which he likes) with Modernist and contemporary American examples (which he dislikes). He criticized most American poetry from 1917 to 1963, beginning with the generation of Modernist poets that included

T.S. Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 18884 January 1965) was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor.Bush, Ronald. "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career", in John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (eds), ''American National B ...

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...

, William Carlos Williams,

H.D. Hilda Doolittle (September 10, 1886 – September 27, 1961) was an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist who wrote under the name H.D. throughout her life. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the ...

and Marianne Moore; then he also vehemently attacked the postwar generation of American poets, specifically citing

Robert Lowell Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (; March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) was an American poet. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the ''Mayflower''. His family, past and present, were important subjects i ...

Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was an American people, American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the N ...

, Randall Jarrell, John Ciardi, Charles Olson,

Karl Shapiro Karl Jay Shapiro (November 10, 1913 – May 14, 2000) was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945 for his collection ''V-Letter and Other Poems''. He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to th ...

John Berryman John Allyn McAlpin Berryman (born John Allyn Smith, Jr.; October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in th ...

, and Delmore Schwartz, all of whom he claimed were negatively influenced by the previous generation. The only American poets from these groups whom he exempted from his critique were

Hart Crane Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Provoked and inspired by T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, '' The Brid ...

and Theodore Roethke. Bly criticized Eliot's idea of the

objective correlative In literary criticism, an objective correlative is a group of things or events which systematically represent emotions. Theory The theory of the objective correlative as it relates to literature was largely developed through the writings of the ...

as emblematic of everything wrong with the Modernist approach to poetry. He wrote that these poets "have more trust in the objective, outer world than in the inner world" and that this made their poetry essentially soulless. He contrasted the Modernists' "scientific" approach with the poetry and ideas of European poets like Federico García Lorca and

Rainer Maria Rilke René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), shortened to Rainer Maria Rilke (), was an Austrian poet and novelist. He has been acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, and is widely recogni ...

. Bly believed that "Eliot and Pound conceive maturity n a poetas a growth of outwardness" which Bly believes is dehumanizing. In sharp contrast, he noted that

advised that a poet should focus on their inner lives and always strive to "go into yourself," and this was the aesthetic path that Bly insisted was the only path that poets could take in order to write worthwhile poetry. Some of the great, European and South American poets who Bly believed followed this path in their writing and were the models that American poets should be imitating (instead of the Modernists) included

Pablo Neruda Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (12 July 1904 – 23 September 1973), better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda (; ), was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Nerud ...

Stéphane Mallarmé Stéphane Mallarmé ( , ; 18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), pen name of Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of ...

, César Vallejo,

Juan Ramón Jiménez Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón (; 23 December 1881 – 29 May 1958) was a Spanish poet, a prolific writer who received the 1956 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his lyrical poetry, which in the Spanish language constitutes an example of high ...

Antonio Machado Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz (26 July 1875 – 22 February 1939), known as Antonio Machado, was a Spanish poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation ...

, Lorca, and Rilke. Some of the scholarly and stylistic approaches to poetry that he criticized over the course of his essay included

The New Criticism New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as ...

, the Metaphysical Poets, Imagism, and Objectivism, all of which he viewed as superficial, overly outward looking, and materialistic.

Footnotes

Essays about poetry 1963 essays {{poetry-essay-stub