Robert Bly, The Man in the Black Coat Turns

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 1981

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem collection

Resources

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The Man in the Black Coat Turns

(1981) contains some of Bly's most personal and private poetry since

Silence in the Snowy Fields

, his first book, published almost twenty years earlier. These poems describe the end of the journey that Bly began in

Silence

– at the same time that he sets out on another new journey. This journey, however, is much more clearly defined than the earlier one: it is a specifically male journey (just as these poems are obsessed with “masculine consciousness”), and it is a journey clear in its knowledge of life advancing on, and turning to face, death. As Bly himself put it in the prefatory note to the poems from

Black Coat

that he included in his

Selected Poems

(1986), he wanted these poems “to rise out of some darkness beneath us”. In order to…

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570 words

Citation: Davis, William V.. "The Man in the Black Coat Turns". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 26 September 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=244, accessed 23 November 2024.]

Robert Bly, The Man in the Black Coat Turns

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