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

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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 was aware of two separate energies: my own consciousness”, fraught with…

493 words

Citation: Davis, William V.. "This Tree Will Be Here For A Thousand Years". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 October 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8296, accessed 28 March 2024.]

8296 This Tree Will Be Here For A Thousand Years 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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