Bly, Robert

Bly, Robert, 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).

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Bly, Robert (Elwood)

(born Dec. 23, 1926, Madison, Minn., U.S.) U.S. poet and translator. Bly attended Harvard University and the University of Iowa. In 1958 he founded the magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties), which published the works of young poets. He helped found American Writers Against the Vietnam War, and he donated his 1968 National Book Award prize money (received for The Light Around the Body) to a draft resisters' organization. His best-selling Iron John (1990) probed the male psyche, and Bly became the best-known leader of the “men's movement.” In 2001 he published The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, poems utilizing the Arabic ghazal form. He is also known for his translations of a wide range of poetry.

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Bly, Robert (Elwood) (1926–  ) poet, writer; born in Madison, Minn. He studied at St. Olaf College, Minn. (1946–47), Harvard (B.A. 1950), University of Iowa (M.A. 1956), eventually settling in Moose Lake, Minn. He was a magazine founder and editor, and is known for translations as well as for his own poetry. His Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), a controversial work propounding his views on the need for modern men to rediscover their essential maleness, unexpectedly if temporarily turned Bly into a cross between a minstrel and a guru as he toured the land strumming his harp and explaining his ideas.