This collection contains some of Bly’s seminal essays on poets and poetry including: Looking for Dragon Smoke, The Eight Stages of Translation, Six Disciplines that Intensify Poetry, and essays on Hirshfield, Stevens, Whitman, Wright, Rilke, Machado, Stafford and others.
I
Dragonsmoke
Six Disciplines That Intensify Poetry
Looking for Dragonsmoke
II
The Imperfect Is Our Paradise
The Work of Jane Hirshfield
Wallace Stevens and Dr. Jekyll
My Doubts About Whitman
Upward into the Depths
Rilke and the Holy
James Wright’s Clarity and Extravagance
A Few Notes on Antonio Machado
William Stafford and the Golden Thread
Some Rumors About Kabir
The Surprises in Ghalib
III
Opinions and Judgments
A Wrong Turning in American Poetry
When Literary Life Was Still Piled Up in a Few Places
The Eight Stages of Translation
IV
Thoreau and Wildness
Thoreau and Wildness