Robert Bly - A Little Book on the Human Shadow

by William Booth

Problems in the Ark

The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us

Five Stages in Exiling, Hunting, and Retrieving the Shadow

Honoring the Shadow: An Interview with William Booth

Wallace Stevens and Dr. Jekyll

W hat Robert Blys poetry readings say in effect is, You must change your life. To hear serious poems and resist all change is worse than a waste of time; it is dangerous. We can remember the warning from Jacob Boehme: Boehme has a note before one of his books in which he asks the reader not to go further and read the book unless he is willing to make practical changes as a result of the reading. Otherwise, Boehme says, the book will be bad for him.

The reference to Boehmes unsettling words appears in Robert Blys brilliant essay on the poetry of Wallace Stevens (part five of this book). In Wallace Stevens and Dr. Jekyll, Bly praises Stevens extraordinary sensory intelligence, but says that his failure to change his life was disastrous to his later poetry. Shadow is the key word in Blys assessment of the poet: Stevens brought the shadow into his poetry but shut it out of his everyday life. Blys tough judgment of Stevens work after he failed to live the shadow is that the late poems are as weak as is possible for a genius to write.

Shadow is one of Carl Jungs most useful terms for a part of the human psyche. Its advantage is that it conveys a visual imagewe might call the shadow the dark, unlit, and repressed side of the ego complex, the Jungian analyst Marie Louise von Franz says in Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales . But this is only partly true, she adds, lest we get caught in the negative connotation of the image. She tells of an occasion when Jung, impatient as always with Jungians, dismissed a nit-picking discussion of the concept by protesting, This is all nonsense! The shadow is simply the whole unconscious. The definition Von Franz settles on is neutral and lucid: in the first stage of approach to the unconscious, the shadow is simply a mythological name for all that within me of which I cannot directly know.

Robert Blys intense interest in the concept of the human shadow goes back to early years when he lived alone in New York City. He has often spoken of this bleak period of his life, recalling an awareness of his own relationship to the shadow as one of the first things he understood clearly for himself. He knew that if any help was going to arrive to lift me out of my misery, it would come from the dark side of my personality. The quotation is from the 1971 poetry reading where he first chose the shadow as a thematic image. He took up the theme in three subsequent readings, though the selection of poems changed and his accompanying commentary grew.

In the present collection of Blys explorations of the shadow there is more poetry and storytelling than doctrinaire psychological discourse. He moves from image to image, and from image to anecdote and fairy tale. The shadow is the long bag we drag behind us, heavy with the parts of ourselves our parents or community didnt approve of. The shadow is also imagined as a thin gray film rolled up in a can, out of sight, but ready to transfix us with lifelike images thrown onto a giant screen or played on a wife or husbands face. The long-repressed shadow of Dr. Jekyll rises up in the shape of Mr. Hyde, deformed, an ape-like figure glimpsed against an alley wall. Bly goes beyond such vivid evocation of the shadows meaning in part three of this book (Five Stages in Exiling, Hunting, and Retrieving the Shadow), showing what one can do to change ones life, call up the energy lost in the shadow, bring back the witch and the giant.

Gathering the shadow readings into a book was a thought that came out of conversations I had with Roger Easson, who has done extensive bibliographical research into Blys publications and recorded readings. Initially it seemed a simple enough matter to transcribe two or three readings, do some editing for the sake of sharper focus, and make the readings available in print.

When Bly saw the transcriptions that Easson and I had done, he was more distressed than we about what had been lost between the stage and the pagevoice, music, gesture, interchange with the audience, all those nonverbal elements that convey meaning and feeling. Extensive revision followed. While the substance of the first three sections of this book is faithful to the original readings, Blys revisions have brought them closer to the essay form.

The first part of this collection, Problems in the Ark, is based on a studio reading recorded for the series Contemporary American Poets Read Their Works, issued by Cassette Curriculum in 1971. Parts two and three are adapted from a reading given for a conference in San Francisco on The Face of the Enemy, January 30, 1983. Part four is a conversation that Bly and I had about the shadow a year or so later. Part five, where Bly lets go the readers hand and moves swiftly ahead into the shadowy forest of Wallace Stevens poetry, first appeared in American Poetry in 1976 , edited by William Heyen.

William Booth