Looking For Dragon Smoke by Robert Bly - Essay Review

An in-depth analysis and review of Robert Bly's essay "Looking for Dragon Smoke." This is our first look at Robert Bly's poetics on the channel. There will be a whole course (100+ hours) dedicated to Robert Bly's work, so be sure to subscribe :)

“In Ancient times, in the “time of inspiration,” the poet flew from one world to another, “riding on dragons,” as the Chinese said. Isaiah rode on those dragons, so did Li Po and Pindar. They dragged behind them long tails of dragon smoke. Some of the dragon smoke still boils out of Beowulf: The Beowulf poet holds tight to Danish soil, or leaps after Grendel into the sea.”

Dragon smoke = a leap

Leap into the unconscious back to the conscious.

Gilgamesh Enkidu polarity

“In terms of language, leaping is the ability to associate fast. In a great poem, the considerable distance between the associations, that is, the distance the spark has to leap, gives the lines their bottomless feeling, their space, and the speed (of the association) increases the excitement of the poetry.”

If you ask me why I dwell among green mountains,
I should laugh silently; my soul is serene.
The peach blossom follows the moving water.
There is another heaven and earth beyond the world of men

Christian consciousness took over however, and these leaps stopped happening as much. If you are touching the subconscious, parts of what you receive will break the Christian narrative.

Chaucer is a decline from Beowulf poet.

Form poems have lost the ability to leap. That’s why it feels like such a slog.

Enlightenment period focused on Socratic lineage of philosophy. The removal of emotions to drive industrial revolution.

Routing of the psychic energy away from darkness and the irrational - Christianity - Industry -

Blake said of a child after ten years of school that they’d live the rest of their lives in “Newtons Sleep.”

Those afraid of the leap are people in “experience” - objective reality -

Blocked love-energy, boredom, envy, and joylessness.

Tapping into the forms present in nature, rather than creating your own.

Novalis, Goethe, and Holderlin in Germany.

Dream interpretation had a lot of pre-christian symbolism.

American fundamentalists hate dark places:

Capitalism is against the descent to the soul:
Realism is against the leap to spirit:

Populism and social thought are against the solitary wildness;

Careerism in poetry doesn’t allow enough time for descent;

The reluctance of recent American poets to translate makes them ignorant.

You have to compare modern work to the thinkers of old.

At the end of the mountain gorge
I heart dark monkeys wail,
In native land a white goose flies over.
Where are my sisters?
Where are my brothers?

Very often intellect is poetry’s enemy because it is too much given to imitation, because it lifts the poet to a throne of sharp edges and makes him oblivious of the fact that he may suddenly be devoured by ants, or a great arsenic lobster may fall on his head.”

To help us seek the deunde, there are neither maps nor discipline. All one knows is that it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, that it rejects all the sweet geometry one has learned, that is breaks with all styles… that it dresses the delicate boy of Rimbaud in an acrobat’s green suit: or that it puts the eye of a dead fish on Count Lautremont in the early morning boulevard.”