Dana Gioia on Robert Bly:

"By propagating this sort of minimalist translation Bly has done immense damage to American poetry. Translating quickly and superficially, he not only misrepresented the work of many great poets, but also distorted some of the basic standards of poetic excellence. His slapdash method ignored both the obvious formal qualities of the originals (like rhyme and meter) and, more crucially, those subtler organizing principles such as diction, tone, rhythm, and texture that frequently gave the poems their intensity. Concentrating almost entirely on syntax and imagery, Bly reduced the complex originals into abstract visual blueprints. In his hands, dramatically different poets like Lorca and Rilke, Montale y Machado, not only sounded alike, they all sounded like Robert Bly, and even then not like Bly at his best. But as if that weren’t bad enough, Bly consistently held up these diminished versions as models of poetic excellence worthy of emulation. In promoting his new poetics (based on his specially chosen foreign models), he set standards so low that he helped create a school of mediocrities largely ignorant of the premodern poetry in English and familiar with foreign poetry only through oversimplified translations." (Gioia 172-73).