'A Wrong Turning in American Poetry' is an essay by United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 poet Robert Bly

Robert Bly

Robert Bly is an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.-Life:Bly was born in Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota, to Jacob and Alice Bly, who were of Norwegian ancestry. Following graduation from high school in 1944, he enlisted in the United States Navy, serving...

 which was first published in Choice 3 in 1963

1963 in poetry

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* January 26 – Raghunath Vishnu Pandit, an Indian poet who wrote in both Konkani and Marathi languages, publishes five books of poems this day* The Belfast Group, a discussion group of poets in...

 and collected in American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity. It has subsequently been anthologized in Twentieth-Century American Poetics. Bly's approach is to hold up for comparison examples by European and South American poets, and also some medieval Arabic poems against contemporary and recent American examples.

Bly criticizes Eliot's idea of the objective correlative

Objective correlative

An objective correlative is a literary term referring to a symbolic article used to provide explicit, rather than implicit, access to such traditionally inexplicable concepts as emotion or colour.- Origin of terminology :Popularized by T. S...

: "These men have more trust in the objective, outer world than in the inner world". He contrasts Eliot's supposedly formulaic approach with that of Federico García Lorca

Federico García Lorca

Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27. He is believed to be one of thousands who were summarily shot by anti-communist death squads...

. Bly also attacks Pound's conception of poetry as a "repository of wisdom", and quotes Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke , better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language...

's Letters to a Young Poet

Letters to a Young Poet

Letters to a Young Poet is a compilation of letters by Rainer Maria Rilke. It consists of 10 letters written to a young man trying to choose between a literary career and entering the Austro-Hungarian Army.-Background:...

: 'You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. There is only one single way. Go into yourself."

Bly provides a list of poets whom he considers to be among the great poets of the century, they are: Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda....

, César Vallejo

César Vallejo

César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet. Although he published only three books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante"...

, Juan Ramón Jiménez

Juan Ramón Jiménez

Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón was a Spanish poet, a prolific writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956. One of Jiménez's most important contributions to modern poetry was his advocacy of the French concept of "pure poetry."-Biography:Jiménez was born in Moguer, near Huelva, in...

, Antonio Machado

Antonio Machado

Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz, known as Antonio Machado was a Spanish poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation of '98....

, and Rilke. He praises the ability of writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was 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 the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...

 and Lorca to "put together inside a line words that have different natures".

Bly asserts that "the poetry we have now is a poetry without the image" by which he means deep image

Deep image

Deep image is a term coined by U.S. poets Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly in the second issue of Trobar in 1961. They used it to describe poetry written by them and by Diane Wakoski and Clayton Eshleman....

. He criticizes imagism

Imagism

Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...

as merely drawing pictures from the real objective world. "Our poetry has been a poetry essentially without the unconscious". He also attacks the almost journalistic approach that this objectivism leads to: "In this country's poems the facts are put in because they happened, regardless of how much they lame the poem."

Bly also writes against the tendency to abstraction, seeing it as "merely another form of the flight from inwardness".