Bly, Robert

Robert Bly, in full Robert Elwood Bly, (born December 23, 1926, Lac qui Parle county, Minnesota, U.S.—died November 21, 2021, Minneapolis, Minnesota), American poet, translator, editor, and author, perhaps best known to the public at large as the author of Iron John: A Book About Men (1990, reprinted 2001 as Iron John: Men and Masculinity). Drawing upon Jungian psychology, myth, legend, folklore, and fairy tales (the title is taken from a story by the Brothers Grimm), the book demonstrates Bly’s masculinist convictions. Though it had many detractors, it proved an important, creative, and best-selling work on the subject of manhood and masculinity for a budding men’s movement in the United States.

After serving in the U.S. Navy, Bly studied at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota (1946–47), Harvard University (B.A., 1950), and the University of Iowa (M.A., 1956). In 1958 he cofounded the magazine The Fifties (its name changed with the decades), which published translations and poetry by Bly and other important young poets. Bly’s first collection of poems, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962), reveals his sense of man in nature. It was followed by The Light Around the Body (1968), which won a National Book Award.

Further volumes of poems and prose poems included Sleepers Joining Hands (1973), This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977), This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (1979), Morning Poems (1997), and Eating the Honey of Words (1999). His poems of The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981) explore themes of male grief and the father-son connection that he developed further in Iron John and also The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine (1999), written with Marion Woodman. Bly’s collected prose poems appeared in 1992 under the title What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?

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Such later collections as Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (1994) and The Urge to Travel Long Distances (2005) are preoccupied with the pastoral landscape of Minnesota. Bly employed the Arabic ghazal form in the poems comprising The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (2001) and My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (2005). He also released a volume of poems protesting the Iraq War, The Insanity of Empire (2004). Bly dubbed the poems in Turkish Pears in August (2007) “ramages,” referencing rameau, the French word for branch; they each contain 85 syllables and focus on a certain vowel sound. Talking into the Ear of a Donkey (2011) consists of poems in a vast range of forms, including haiku and a return to the ghazal. Collected Poems appeared in 2018.

Bly translated the work of many poets, ranging from Rainer Maria Rilke (German) and Tomas Tranströmer (Swedish) to Pablo Neruda and Antonio Machado (Spanish). His translations of Tranströmer’s work led to a fruitful and long-lived collaboration. The Swedish poet reciprocated Bly’s introduction of his poetry to an English-speaking audience by in turn translating some of the American’s poems into his own native tongue. The two men developed a lasting friendship, evident in Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer (2013), a collection of their correspondence from 1964 to 1990. Additionally, Bly translated several works from Norwegian, including Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger (1890; translated 1967) and Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt (1867; translated 2008). He also reworked English translations of poetry by the Indian mystic Kabir (translated from Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore) and the Indian poet Mīrzā Asadullāh Khān Ghālib (translated from Urdu by Sunil Datta). Bly’s other works included More Than True: The Wisdom of Fairy Tales (2018).

Bly was the first official poet laureate of Minnesota (2008–11).