Ted reviewed Iron John by Robert Bly
Review of 'Iron John' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
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.
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.