In an essay published in 1961, Robert Kelly coined the term "deep image" in reference to a new movement in American poetry. Ironically, the term grew in popularity despite the critical disapproval of it by the group's leading theorist and spokesperson, Robert Bly. Speaking with Ekbert Faas in 1974, Bly explains that the term deep image "suggests a geographical location in the psyche," rather than, as Bly prefers, a notion of the poetic image which involves psychic energy and movement (TM 259).1 In a later interview, Bly states:
Let's imagine a poem as if it were an animal. When animals run, they have considerable flowing rhythms. Also they have bodies. An image is simply a body where psychic energy is free to move around. Psychic energy can't move well in a non-image statement. (180)
Such vague and metaphorical theoretical statements are characteristic of Bly, who seems reluctant to speak about technique in conventional terms. Although the group's poetry is based on the image, nowhere has Bly set down a clear definition of the image or anything resembling a manifesto of technique. And unlike other "upstart" groups writing in the shadow of Pound and Eliot, the deep image poets-including Bly, Louis Simpson, William Stafford, and James Wright-lacked the equivalent of the Black Mountain group's "Projective Verse," or even, as in the Beats' "Howl," a central important poem which critics could use as a common point of reference. This essay, then, attempts to shed some light on the mystery surrounding the deep image aesthetic. It traces the theory and practice of Robert Bly's poetic image through the greater part of his literary career thus far.
