The reader can't help but speculate whether this friendship with, and advocacy of, Tranströmer is at least in part a way to explore this aspect of himself. He grieves again when the tanks roll into Prague in 1968, as the cold war intensifies in Europe.īly also embraces his Scandinavian roots, which he calls "European".
Repeatedly, in the early letters, Tranströmer reacts with emotion to world news, and to American domestic politics, about which he seems strikingly well‑informed: "Naturally the Oregon primary was a bad blow I was unhappy as a wet dog all the next day," he writes in June 1966.
#AIRMAIL 3 REVIEW SERIES#
Today, he has outlived his notoriety as author of the pioneering men's movement book, Iron John, and these letters remind us of earlier, wider engagement: writing political verse, founding and editing the magazine series that started as The Fifties and ended as The Seventies, publishing other poets' collections and, during the Vietnam war, organising "read-ins" and other protest events.Ī shared outrage at American foreign policy in south-east Asia was clearly important to this friendship, which started in 1964 when a magazine subscription from Tranströmer arrived on the very day that Bly had driven for three hours to find his book in the Minnesota University library. Instead, suspect elements of old-fashioned individualism, including religiosity, have been detected" in his work by hostile critics.īly on the other hand, is a poet-activist. In 1967, he tells Bly: "One should preferably be a card-carrying Marxist.
(It does make a couple of off-stage appearances: in "Allegro", as the tiring day from which the narrator recovers by playing Haydn, and in "Loneliness" when he is forced to make a dangerous winter commute.) Airmail reveals how often his approach went against the grain of Swedish literary consensus. Yet this profession is rarely evident in his writing, except perhaps as a pervasive emotional intelligence.
Tranströmer worked as a psychologist in Sweden's public health and prison services. These two great poets of the 60s generation differ from each other not only poetically but in their lives, as their letters reveal. A t first glance the friendship between Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, whose transatlantic correspondence has been published in English as the compulsively readable Airmail, is a surprising one.
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