The Sea and the Honeycomb: A Book of Tiny Poems

Robert Bly

Beacon Press, 1971 - Poetry - 107 pages

"The purpose of 'The sea and the honeycomb' is to provide examples of what has been done so far in Europe, America, and Asia with the poem of three or four lines. Epigrams have not been included. This book is interested in another sort of poem which tries, in the words of Juan Ramon Jiménez, to arrive at the greatest possible richness by the simplest possible means. The book contains English language poems, as well as poems translated from ancient and modern languages ... Significantly enlarged from the original Sixties Press publication, the book also includes foreign language texts, and an introductory essay by Robert Bly"--From back cover.

Contents

• The Owl Guillaume Apollinaire: 15
• Look Down Fair Moon Walt Whitman: 27
• Ten Haikus Issa: 39

About the author

Robert Bly lives on a farm in his native state of Minnesota. He edited The Seventies magazine, which he founded as The Fifties and in the next decade called The Sixties. In 1966, with David Ray, he organized American Writers Against the Vietnam War. The Light Around the Body, which won the National Book Award in 1968, was strongly critical of the war in Vietnam and of American foreign policy. Since publication of Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), a response to the women's movement, Bly has been immensely popular, appearing on talk shows and advising men to retrieve their primitive masculinity through wildness. Bly is also a translator of Scandinavian literature, such as Twenty Poems of Tomas Transtromer. Through the Sixties Press and the Seventies Press, he introduced little-known European and South American poets to American readers. His magazines have been the center of a poetic movement involving the poets Donald Hall, Louis Simpson, and James Wright.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Sea and the Honeycomb: A Book of Tiny Poems; Volume 399 of Beacon paperback, 399
• Editor: Robert Bly
• Translated by: Robert Bly
• Compiled by: Robert Bly
• Publisher: Beacon Press, 1971
• Original from: the University of California
• Digitized: Jul 9, 2007
• ISBN: 0807064106, 9780807064108
• Length: 107 pages
• Subjects: Poetry / Anthologies (multiple authors)