Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter

“Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” is a five line-poem first published in Robert Bly’s debut poetry collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962). This collection was widely praised by critics and “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” is an excellent example of Bly’s early style. As is typical for much of his earliest work, the poem is written in free verse, without set rhyme and meter. The poem demonstrates Bly’s skillful use of concise language and his sharp focus on natural imagery. The poem is a typical construction for Bly. Objective observation is juxtaposed by emotional epiphany, or realization, which the reader sees at the end of the poem when Bly’s speaker correlates the snowy evening to a beloved state of privacy.

Although Bly studied at Harvard in the late 1940s, and was friendly with the circle of intellectual poets headed by John Ashbery known as the New York School, he didn’t feel like his style fit with theirs. He was also sympathetic to but did not align himself with the Beat poets.