Bly, Robert (1926-2021), was an American poet most widely known as a leader of the men’s movement. This movement is a communal effort to rediscover the spiritual roots of maleness. Bly’s prose work Iron John: A Book About Men (1990) is a key document in the movement. Bly analyzes flaws he sees in modern American society in another prose work, The Sibling Society (1996).
Long before the publication of Iron John, Bly was known for his quiet yet startling poems. His poems most often evoke intensely inward states of solitude, silence, and secrecy. Bly found these qualities not only in people but also in landscapes—often Midwestern, winter landscapes. He also found these qualities in animals, in plants, and even in inanimate objects. Bly wrote beautiful love poems as well as fierce poems opposing the Vietnam War (1957-1975) and the Iraq War (2003-2011). He also wrote The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (2001) and My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (2005), two books of ghazals, a Persian verse form that creates surprising leaps between seemingly unrelated images.
Robert Elwood Bly was born on Dec. 23, 1926, in Lac qui Parle County in western Minnesota, and he grew up there on his parents’ farm. From 1944 to 1946, he served in the United States Navy. Bly then studied at St. Olaf Collge in Northfield, Minnesota, for a year before transferring to Harvard University, where he completed a bachelor of arts degree in 1950. He entered the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1954 and completed a master of arts degree in 1956.
A good introduction to Bly’s work is Collected Poems (2018), which includes all 14 of his previous collections plus many uncollected poems. A selection of Bly’s translations of Latin American, European, and Asian poets was published as The Winged Energy of Delight (2004). Bly and the English scholar Leonard Lewisohn translated 30 poems by Hafiz, a Persian poet of the 1300’s, as The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door (2008). Bly died on Nov. 21, 2021.
