로버트 블라이의 어둠의 시학

The Poetics of Darkness in the Poetry of Robert Bly

This paper attempts to show that darkness functions as one of the most important and prevailing poetic motifs in Robert Bly's poetry. Bly uses darkness in various ways throughout his poetry. He, who sometimes identifies darkness with the unconscious, argues that American poetry has been "poetry essentially without the unconscious." Bly suggests that modern males tend to ignore their darker side of their inner psyche. Thus the mental state of the modern man is seriously imbalanced. Bly as a seer tries to help his readers get into the darker side of their inner world. Darkness used in many of the poems in his first book of poetry, silence in the snowy Fields, is related with his theory of leaping poetry and the female consciousness and chthonic unconscious realm. Image of darkness used by Bly is somewhat womb-like in that being exposed to darkness would help him restore the wholeness and promise a new birth. In sleepers Joining Hands, the image of darkness is more diverse. Many of the poems in sleepers reveal that water under the earth and human hair are also directly related with the image of darkness. Bly criticizes the Puritan idea that Indians, whose hair is dark, are Satanic. Moreover, in some of his other poems, Bly shows that darkness is more like "the curved energy" which is equivalent to the creative energy in the universe. Thus, for Bly, being exposed to darkness would mean sharing the vital living force with all living beings.