17 pages • 34 minutes read
Robert BlyDriving to Town Late to Mail a Letter
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1962A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Robert Bly began his studies in the 1940s at St. Olaf College in Minnesota but soon transferred to Harvard. There, he was introduced to formal poetry—particularly the classic British poets and modernists. He met and studied with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Adrienne Rich, and Donald Hall, who all became notable American poets from The New York School of Poets. These young writers—who rejected the modernists who came before them—were a tremendous influence on Bly, as were the Beat poets. Yet, although he wrote several poems while completing his degrees, he felt there were key elements missing from his work. He didn’t quite fit with either group of noted young poets.
In 1956, on a Fulbright Grant, Bly went to Norway to study and translate Norwegian poetry. Besides his work on Norwegian writers, he discovered the work of Spanish-language poets, including César Vallejo, Frederico Garcia Lorca, and Pablo Neruda. The surrealist imagery these poets employed deeply affected Bly and he realized he wanted to comparably enliven his own work. However, the urban landscape of New York City wasn’t for him. He settled back in Minnesota and began writing. These poems comprised his debut collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields.
Bly’s objective was to move from the consciously art-focused work of his contemporaries like Ashbery into a poetry that embraced clear image bolstered by subconscious thought. He felt the world of poetry could only approach outward significance by turning inward. He believed poetry that moved by intuitive association and playfulness could be stronger than poetry that plodded along, with explicit explanation throughout. While Bly later embraced the world of politics in poetry, his first collection contains a more circumspect view.
Historical & Geographical Context
In 1956, Bly and his wife settled on a farm south of Madison, Minnesota in the western part of the state. The town was rural and the farm even more remote. There was no running water in the house, but there was a small studio outside where Bly wrote “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter.” Bly’s return to Minnesota was pivotal. As he says in the PBS broadcast “A Thousand Years of Joy,” it allowed him to find the poetic voice that was alluding him. Bly said, “[i]t turns out that I knew certain words. One of them was snow. I knew the meaning of the word snow.” These words and the landscape were “still connected with the original childhood experiences” and for Bly, “going back to the place I was born was tremendously helpful to me in getting ahold of words that were genuine and real.” For Bly, the winter fields were alive with swirls of snow, which became a metaphor for the eddying emotions of his poems’ speakers.
This particularly harsh rural landscape of Minnesota is crucial to understanding “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” and the motivations of the speaker. The trip is no simple jaunt. The driver would have to carefully navigate the journey, paying attention to the amount of snow and ice on the road. There would have been no guiding GPS, fewer snowplows, and the lights in the country would likely have been intermittent or non-existent. The town itself would have also been darker than any contemporary town with advancements in street lighting and neon signage. The lack of artificial light would have added to the sense of “privacy” (Line 4) the speaker loves. Moreover, the winters of 1961 and 1962 in Minnesota were amongst the coldest on record, and the mean temperature in December 1961, in Madison, was 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
The importance of the mail is another aspect of this poem with which a contemporary reader might not be familiar. When the poem was published in 1962, there was no instantaneous communication via electronic messaging. The quickest way to communicate was by phone, but long-distance calling was expensive. Postal mail was an essential tool for communication. For many, letters felt more permanent and were read multiple times. The decision to put thoughts into writing suggests a weight to the words that could explain the speaker’s decision to mail the letter late and/or to drive into town in the snow. From 1924 to 1955, mailboxes were often made of cast-iron and were post-mounted. Cast-iron boxes began to be phased out in 1955 but were still used in remote towns in 1962. Cast-iron would be particularly cold on a winter’s night, enhancing Bly’s emphasis on temperature, landscape, and physical discomfort.
