ROBERT BLY was in Cambridge one Saturday last spring. He wasn't giving a reading, no poetry conferences had been proposed; he was simply visiting friends. He spent the afternoon in the Grolier Bookshop and the Bick, and the evening in an apartment on Beacon Hill, reading from a long unpublished poem to an audience of four.

The present moment appears to be one in which language has been surrendered as a possibility; we are silent at films, in music, among ourselves. We are living in silence. So it's no longer surprising that poetry, like our voices, has turned inward, listening to its own hermetic cadences. Poets in America, having no choice, have either sealed themselves within the tombs of universities, or become exiles in their own land, living far away from the sources of anxiety. To write is to survive.

Bly has lived in both these worlds, and insists that one is stifling, the other salvation. Returning to Harvard after World War II, he and classmates John Ashbery and Donald Hall converged on a world-which seemed to them intolerably diminished; they revived The Advocate, published their own poems, and decided to become writers. They all did. Hall sailed off to study at Oxford, most of the others ended up in graduate school, and Bly went to New York to live alone. "I got nowhere fast, but I was able to do a lot of reading and thinking that the poets who had stayed on in school were not able to do."

After nearly three years in New York, living alone ("I didn't even have enough money to take out a girl"), he moved back to his family's farm in Minnesota, and has been in the neighborhood of it ever since. His first book, Silence in the Snowy Fields, collected a group of poems as muffed as a snowstorm in midwinter. They were like quiet songs, spoken out of solitude, poems in which A Man Writes to a Part of Himself. Even then, a nervous aura of crisis crept into his work:

A strange unrest hovers over the nations: This is the last dance, the wild tossing of Morgan's seas,

The division of spoils. A lassitude Enters into the diamonds of the body.

Like Robert Lowell, Bly sensed that what America had come to was inevitable, because of what it had been, a "torpid land" where "The stones bow as the saddened armies pass."

But their affinities ended with this recognition, because Lowell has been on the cover of Time. and Bly has become the most radical, angry, and influential poet of his generation (which is not Lowell's). Ten years ago. the best poets in America were still insisting on their own exclusivity; erudite and brilliant teachers the generation which included John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Randall Jarrell were acknowledged as a tradition in themselves. Berryman still is one, but Jarrell and Schwartz, along with Theodore Roethke, are dead and, since their deaths. American poetry has been seized by an urgency other than the one to which they devoted their lives.

PLAGUED by a tradition which seems remote from their own experience. the new poets have struggled to create a style which they could know as their own; drawn, like all the rest of us, into a bias of activity. theirs is essentially a poetry of polities, but not of propaganda. Bly himself has managed to remain a sensitive images and at the same time to carry on his unceasing opposition to the War. Publishing his own periodical. The Sixties (now The Seventies ). has allowed him a vigorous forum for his own aesthetics, which his national prominence has made it impossible to ignore. Two years ago, when Bly won the National Book Award for his second volume. The Light Around the Body. he abandoned the speech which had been submitted for approval, and gave another, castigating the government, New York literati. and several other victims; then presented the check awarded him to a member of the Resistance. all before an audience of the most prestigious publishers and poets in America.

In an essay called "The Dead World and the Live World." written for The Sixties. Bly complained about the refusal of our literature to "shed its skin." to talk about what wasn't "exclusively human.": "One can predict first of all that such a nation will bomb foreign populations very easily, since it has no sense of anything real beyond its own ego." To this insight Bly has brought the evidence of poets in translation, publishing in small editions the work of Spanish. German, and Scandinavian writers who were receiving little or no attention in this country. It is from poets like Trakl and Neruda, or Vallejo, that we must learn about the poetry of "feeling, will, and intellect." for their achievement is "a poetry that goes deep into the human being, much deeper than the ego."