From Dana Gioia's essay, "The Successful Career of Robert Bly: "By propogating this minimal kind of translation Bly has done immense damage to American poetry. Translating quickly and superficially, he not only misrepresented the work of many great poets, he also distorted some of the basic standards of poetic excellence. His slapdash method ignored both the obvious formal qualitites of the originals (like rhyme and meter) and more crucially, those subtler organizing prinicples such as diction, tone, rhythm and texture that frequently gave the poems their intensity...In his hands, dramatically different poets like Lorca and Rilke, Montale and Machado, not only all sound alike, they all sounded like Robert Bly, and even then not like Bly at his best."
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