Bly, Robert

Related Category: American Literature: Biographies

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.

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