Iron John

This book is enjoyable if read as a pleasant bit of literary analysis with some attendant meditation on the human condition. Mythopoetics is nice. But when read as prescriptive, it's saddled with seemingly endless Freudian and Jungian judgments that portend to be universal; proclamations of the sort that are very appealing to college-aged readers but ring ridiculous any time after that. The writer is perfectly entitled to make these aesthetic leaps, but the wizened reader is not bound to take them all seriously.

Robert Bly looks at men something like Camille Paglia looks at women. He feels they need to retrieve their gender from the curse of androgeny. Men need to be fierce, he says . I'm not sure what that means. I'd just read Sebastian Junger and thought he was on to something, perhaps similar in that he tried to fix what the current culture gets wrong. Robert Bly is doing the same, but he takes more of a Joseph Campbell route. There was a time (and I'm not just saying that because I was taking psychedelics) when I thought that was where the answer lay. But I no longer think that's the way to go. Or, that we need to go back to how we used to do it. Initiation, wound, shamen, etc.

Yeah, there were things we've lost but also things we've gained since the older modes of looking at things. Yeah, the current culture is broken in many aspects but so were the older, more mythic ones. We just weren't around then to notice and so we glorify them.

Yes, men need to learn how to deal with their anger other than suppress it or act it out violently, but so do women. I'm not a poet so I use the language of psychotherapy but I understand why this book will appeal to a lot of men who feel they've lost something or were cheated out of it. A lot of people voted for Donald Trump because of feeling that way, but the poetic solutions of the mythic will not fix it for them any more than a Trump presidency.