| المستخلص: |
Robert Bly (b. 1926 -) stands as one of the prominent contemporary American writers. His literary stature rests on a rich poetic vision, a good deal of prose writings, and translations of surrealist and mystic poets as well. Bly's poetry, specifically, covers a wide range of topics ranging from speculative thought through to the most mundane and common in American life. It relies for its effect on a variety of non-narrative modes of expression and techniques- although he reveals repeatedly in his interviews and critical pronouncements a great abhorrence to the word technique, preferring the use of the word "making." This attitude is, understandably, consonant with his subjective mode as perfectly incarnated in his surrealistic practices throughout his long poetic career beginning from Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962) up to the most recent collection. His perception of the essence of surrealistic images and processes, however, departs remarkably from what critics, either deliberately or in deliberately, take as rooted in the American "Deep Image" tradition. Bly himself has repeatedly expressed his rejection of that unreal affinity established between his surrealistic efforts and those of the Deep Image convention. His surrealism converges, rather, on its authentic sources found in Latin American and European surrealist masters and practitioners who informed him and his poetry its great potentialities. It highlights, also, his taste for Freud's and Jung's theories of the unconscious and the Archetypes of the mind, in addition to Oriental mysticism. The objective of the current study, accordingly, is mainly to trace Bly’s surrealism to such original sources. It aims, moreover, at highlighting surrealism as an effective tool that helped Bly to make connections between his worldly concerns and his mystical aspirations as distinctly modeled and masterly practiced in The Light Around the Body.
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