Robert Bly, Sleepers Joining Hands

William V. Davis (Baylor University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), 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 (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1973

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection

Resources

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Sleepers Joining Hands

(1973), Robert Bly's third major collection of poems, is divided into three sections. The first begins with “Six Winter Privacy Poems”, and thus it evokes the lyrics of

Silence in the Snowy Fields

, Bly's first book. This section ends with “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last”, a long anti-war poem castigating the war in Vietnam, and is thus a sequel to the blatantly outspoken anti-war poems in Bly's second book,

The Light Around the Body

. The central section consists of a long prose essay, “I Came Out of the Mother Naked”, in which Bly summarises his views on “mother” and “father consciousness” and on the ways in which ancient archetypes and contemporary “new brain” theories (informed by a psychology based on the work of C. G. Jung) join and…

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593 words

Citation: Davis, William V.. "Sleepers Joining Hands". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 September 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2015, accessed 24 April 2024.]

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