Robert Bly

Home > People > Literature and the Arts > American Literature: Biographies

Bly, Robert [Elwood] (1926–), Minnesota‐born poet, whose first volume, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962), contains spare poems of the native farm scene in which he continues to live, direct but also marked by striking imagery. The poems in The Light Around the Body (1967) differ in that some are more mystical, others more political in his intense hatred of the Vietnam War. The work was selected for a National Book Award, and Bly gave the prize money to an anti‐draft organization. Later numerous poems, some prose poems, appear in more than 30 separate works, including: Chrysanthemums (1967), Water Under the Earth (1972), Sleepers Joining Hands (1973), Point Reyes Poems (1973), Old Man Rubbing His Eyes (1975), This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977), Counting Small Boned Bodies (1979), This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (1979), News of the Universe (1980), The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), At the Time of Peony Blossoming (1983), Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985), In the Month of May (1985), The Moon on a Fencepost (1988), Out of the Rolling Ocean (1988), Snowbanks North of the House (1999), The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (2001), and My Sentence was a Thousand Years of Joy (2005). He has translated some fiction of Selma Lagerlöf and of Knut Hamsun, as well as much poetry from German, Spanish, and Swedish, including that of Trakl, Neruda, Rilke, and Lorca, who have influenced him. His periodical, originally The Fifties, which changes its title with each decade, has printed some of these authors, as well as Americans. Leaping Poetry (1975) is a critical work, as are The Eight Stages of Translation (1983) and an interpretation of Carl Jung's work, A Little Book on the Human Shadow (1988). Iron John (1990), an interpretation of a medieval tale of the quest, contains instructions on becoming a whole man, and was a bestseller. The Darkness Around Us Is Deep (1994) is a selection of poems chosen by William Stafford.

Robert Bly 1926–, American writer, translator, editor, and publisher, b. Madison, Minn., grad. Harvard, 1950. His poems, personal and precisely observant, are informed by the American landscape. Among his volumes of poetry are The Light Around the Body (1967), Sleepers Joining Hands (1972), The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), and Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985). As head of the Sixties Press he printed unconventional poetry and translations from lesser-known foreign poets. Since the early 1980s Bly has been active in the "men's movement," concerned with establishing a new idea of masculinity in contemporary society. In his bestselling nonfiction work Iron John (1990), Bly traces various passages from boyhood to manhood and urges men to explore their relations to their fathers and to discover their primitive masculinity. In The Sibling Society (1996) Bly posits that contemporary adults behave like eternal adolescents due to the absence of proper parental authority figures. In The Maiden King (1998), written with Marion Woodman, Bly uses Russian myth to explore masculine-feminine development in men.

Bibliography: See studies by R. P. Sugg (1986) and W. V. Davis (1989).