Robert Bly

Robert Bly (Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota, 1926 - Minneapolis, 2021) was an American poet, translator and essayist. Over several decades he became one of the most recognizable figures in American poetry, and his prose book on masculinity reached readers far beyond the usual audience for verse.

Born to a family of Norwegian descent, he served in the Navy after finishing high school in 1944. He studied at St. Olaf College and then at Harvard, where he met young people who would later become known as writers. A Fulbright grant took him to Norway in 1956 to translate Norwegian poetry into English. There he came across international poets who were barely read in the United States, among them Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda and Rainer Maria Rilke.

His early poems, plain and imagistic in style, shaped American verse in the following two decades. In 1963 he published an essay arguing that much American poetry since the Modernists had become impersonal and detached, and he urged poets to look to more inward European and Latin American models. He spoke out publicly against the Vietnam War, and his later books turned to myth, Indian ecstatic poetry and meditation.

His best-known book, Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), became an international bestseller and is credited with inspiring the mythopoetic men's movement in the United States. His legacy also includes the Great Mother Conference, an annual gathering he organized in 1975, and his appointment as Minnesota's first poet laureate in 2008.