Robert Bly

Poet

• Born: December 23, 1926
• Birthplace: Madison, Minnesota
• Died: November 21, 2021
• Place of death: Minneapolis, Minnesota

American poet and translator

Biography

Robert Elwood Bly first emerged as a singular voice among the young poets of the 1960’s who were both protesting America’s involvement in the Vietnam War and resisting the erudite, obscurantist tendencies of poetry writing that had been fostered by modernism. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, he became a leader in the so-called men’s movement, espousing a rediscovery by American males of ancient notions of masculinity.

The son of Jacob Thomas Bly and Alice Aws Bly, Bly grew up on a farm in rural Minnesota. After graduating from high school toward the end of World War II, he joined the United States Navy and, upon his discharge in 1946, enrolled in a premedical program at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. In 1947, Bly transferred to Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. He earned a master’s degree at the University of Iowa in Iowa City in 1956 and was awarded a Fulbright grant to visit Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English.

Bly, who had married Carolyn McLean in 1955, settled on a farm outside his native Madison, where, in 1958, he launched a literary magazine, The Fifties, subsequently published as The Sixties and The Seventies. He advocated an American poetry free of British influences and associated with the poetry of T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate. His own poetry, with its reliance on the resources of the unconscious and a surrealistic tone reminiscent of the contemporary Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, re-created the quiet and solitude of life in rural Minnesota. His first single-authored collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields, was for many a welcome change of pace in a poetic landscape dominated by an often depressing urban vision.

Bly’s second volume, The Light Around the Body, was equally well received, winning the prestigious National Book Award for poetry in 1968. By this time, however, Bly was caught up in the antiwar movement opposing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. As early as 1966 he had helped to organize American Writers Against the Vietnam War, and in “read-ins” on college campuses he delivered angry polemics against President Lyndon B. Johnson and those members of his administration regarded as the engineers of U.S. war policy. Bly used his National Book Award acceptance speech to excoriate his own publisher for failing to protest the war and donated his $1,000 prize to the antiwar movement.

The 1973 volume Sleepers Joining Hands continued Bly’s antiwar activism in a poetry that expressed his abhorrence of the U.S. role in Vietnam in uncompromising terms; this stance was reflected as well in seminars he conducted for women during the 1960’s and 1970’s on the subject of the Great Mother. As Bly saw it, the gradual submergence of the ancient life-force principle embodied in the Great Mother in favor of a male-dominated godhead had resulted in the heartless logic of the moralistic culture of post-Christian America.

A divorce in 1979 and a second marriage in 1980, to Jungian therapist Ruth Ray, along with an invitation in 1981 from a commune in New Mexico to lead similar seminars for men, resulted in Bly’s seeking imagery appropriate to the spiritual struggles of men in modern America. The principal image he seized upon as a masculine equivalent to the Great Mother was the character of Iron John, the wild man of the forest from a Brothers Grimm tale. This mythic wild man served, in Bly’s view, as a fitting metaphor for each contemporary American male’s need to reattach himself to his own most challenging and empowering masculine roots.

Bly used Iron John as a metaphorical tool in his workshops throughout the 1980’s, and in 1990 he published Iron John: A Book About Men, which explored the paralyzing malaise afflicting his fellow Americans and, by extension, contemporary culture. The book was an immediate if controversial best-seller, dominating The New York Times nonfiction list for more than a year. The result has been a mixed blessing for the poet turned cultural spokesman and social critic. Bly’s trenchant analysis of the crisis in American life made him a public figure, but some of his opponents, feminists prominent among them, see the former antiwar activist as having become a reactionary male chauvinist. From a literary standpoint, Bly can be seen as filling the role of social catalyst and public naysayer he has always regarded as the province of the poet.

Bibliography

Davis, William V. Robert Bly: The Poet and His Critics. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994. This chronological study traces the twists and turns of Bly’s reputation, accounting for both the aesthetic and nonaesthetic components of critical judgments.

Davis, William V. Understanding Robert Bly. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. A book-length study of Bly’s poetic career, geared to an understanding of the chronological development and ongoing significance of Bly’s life and work through a detailed analysis of individual poems and an in-depth consideration of each of the major books. Includes a primary and secondary bibliography and an index.

Harris, Victoria Frenkel. The Incorporative Consciousness of Robert Bly. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. This in-depth study examines Bly’s poetry in terms of his idea of universalizing poetic processes. Contains an exhaustive bibliography of work by and about Bly.

Jones, Richard, and Kate Daniels, eds. Of Solitude and Silence: Writings on Robert Bly. Boston: Beacon Press, 1981. A miscellany of materials on Bly, including essays, memoirs, poems, notes, and documents, as well as new poems and translations by Bly. Includes an extensive primary and secondary bibliography but no index.

Nelson, Howard. Robert Bly: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. A detailed critical introduction to and analysis of Bly’s career through The Man in the Black Coat Turns, stressing the way in which his various theories illuminate his poems. Includes a chronology of his life, a primary and secondary bibliography, and an index.

Peseroff, Joyce, ed. Robert Bly: When Sleepers Awake. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. A substantial collection of reviews and essays (including several previously unpublished) on Bly and his work through The Man in the Black Coat Turns. Includes an extensive primary and secondary bibliography but no index.

Quetchenbach, Bernard W. Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000. In a lengthy chapter on Bly, the author explores Bly’s concept of a true humanity, including his insistence that consciousness be linked to the environment or disaster will follow.

Sugg, Richard P. Robert Bly. Boston: Twayne, 1986. An introductory critical overview of Bly’s work and career stressing a Jungian interpretation, through The Man in the Black Coat Turns. Includes a selected bibliography of primary and secondary sources and an index.