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. After further study, he returned to his home state of Minnesota to develop a distinctive voice and subject matter. Rather than borrowing from the formal structure of the English tradition or the modernist penchant for high allusion, Bly turned to everyday experience, writing about the rural Midwestern landscape surrounding him. Bly employs an associative technique in which the poetic imagery isn’t necessarily literally connected but is emotionally associated. This adds a richness and depth to his work, which is clearly seen in “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter.”

Poet Biography

One of America’s most celebrated poets, Robert Elwood Bly was born in Minnesota in 1926. His father was an alcoholic which deeply affected Bly, although he retained emotional closeness with his mother. Following his high school graduation in 1944, Bly enlisted in the Navy and served two years during World War II. Returning home, he started his studies in Minnesota, but transferred to Harvard where he met poets who would become leaders in the field, including Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Donald Hall. After graduation he went to New York City and worked menial jobs as he struggled to find his poetic voice. He enrolled in the Iowa Writers Workshop and earned his master’s degree in creative writing, alongside poets W. D. Snodgrass and Donald Justice. In 1955, he married his first wife, the writer Carol (nee McLean) Bly.

In 1956, Bly went to Norway as a Fulbright Scholar to translate the works of Norwegian poetry. During his research, he began reading the works of European and South American surrealists, which radically altered his vision of poetry. Upon his return to the United States, he and Carol settled in Bly’s hometown of Madison, Minnesota and started a family; they had four children. At this time, Bly founded a literary magazine called The Fifties (later renamed The Sixties and The Seventies, respective to the corresponding decade), which became renowned for its work in translation and essays on American poetry. Bly’s farm became a destination for other young poets like James Wright, who—like Donald Hall—became a life-long friend.

In his native northern landscape, Bly finally found his voice and published his first collection of poems. Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962) was critically well-received for its blunt, image-centered style. By the mid-sixties, Bly became increasingly political—both as a writer and an activist—co-founding American Writers Against the Vietnam War. This new interest was exhibited in many poems of his second collection The Light Around the Body, which won the National Book Award in 1968. Bly's "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last" (1970) is considered a major contribution to American anti-war poetry.

In the 1970s, Bly became increasingly interested in both Native American poetry and philosophy as well as works of myth and fairytale. During this time, he was enormously productive, publishing significant works in translation and poetry of his own. Bly’s poetry collections, Sleepers Joining Hands (1973) and This Tree Will Be Here for A Thousand Years (1979), combined pastoral subjects and antiwar themes with his growing interest in the power of myth. Bly was highly influenced by the psychological studies of myth by Robert Graves and Joseph Campbell.

In the 1980s, Bly published several more collections of poetry, including The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985), and Selected Poems (1986). At the end of the decade, after a painful divorce from Carol, Bly began to examine men’s troubled relationships with their fathers and toxic masculinity, through the lens of myth and fairytale. He wrote Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), a sociological prose study which became a controversial best seller. While some decried it as anti-feminist, other’s lauded Bly’s discussion of how the constant outward striving for achievement is detrimental to spiritual and empathetic development in men. Bly revisited the topic in subsequent books including The Sibling Society (1996) and The Maiden King: The Reunion of the Masculine and Feminine, co-authored with Marion Woodman (1998).

The controversy over Iron John briefly diminished Bly’s reputation as a poet, but he continued to write. His work—particularly Morning Poems (1998)—was critically acclaimed throughout the 1990s and 2000s. He is still widely praised for his works in translation. The world of poetry is richer for his translations of Swedish, Norwegian, German, Spanish, Persian, and Urdu poets. Bly received The McKnight Foundation’s Distinguished Artist Award in 2000 and was named Minnesota’s first poet laureate in 2008. In 2013 he was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement.

Since he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2012, Bly has cut back on public appearances and output. His latest book of poetry, Stealing Sugar from the Castle: Selected and New Poems, appeared in 2013 while his nonfiction study, More Than True: The Wisdom of Fairy Tales came out in 2018. He lives with his current wife, Ruth Counsell Bly, in Minnesota.

Poem Text

Bly, Robert. “Driving To Town Late to Mail a Letter.” 1962. Library of Congress.

Summary

In Robert Bly’s “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter,” the speaker drives into town on a snowy night to mail a letter. The temperature is cold, and the snow is swirling. No one else is out on the main street. The speaker finds the iron mailbox door cold to the touch. They enjoy being alone in the snow and decide to continue to drive around, although there is no further errand to complete. Although the poem is brief, Bly imbues the text multiple meanings. Within only five lines, the reader is offered an observation of the snowy night, a love letter to the wintery landscape, and a contemplation on the deep need for privacy.