Robert Bly

Who Was Robert Bly?

Robert Bly was one of the most influential American poets of the second half of the twentieth century — a writer, translator, editor, and cultural critic whose work spanned poetry, mythology, psychology, and what he called the men’s movement. Born in Madison, Minnesota, educated at St. Olaf College and Harvard, he founded the literary magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties and The Seventies), which introduced American readers to the work of Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Georg Trakl, and other international poets whose influence transformed American poetry.

His poetry collections — particularly Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962), The Light Around the Body (1967, National Book Award), and Sleepers Joining Hands (1973) — developed a distinctive mode of deep image poetry that drew on surrealism, Jungian psychology, and mystical traditions to access what Bly called “the dark side of the brain.” His anti-Vietnam War poetry was among the most politically engaged of his generation.

His prose work Iron John (1990), a reading of a Grimm fairy tale as a map of male psychological development, became an unexpected bestseller and launched the mythopoetic men’s movement. Bly’s engagement with myth, archetype, and the masculine spiritual journey is significant for TLA because it represents a serious attempt to recover the deep structures of human meaning that secular modernity has suppressed — an attempt that points toward the gospel without quite arriving there.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Silence in the Snowy Fields — 1962
• The Light Around the Body — 1967 — National Book Award
• Sleepers Joining Hands — 1973
• Iron John: A Book About Men — 1990
• Morning Poems — 1997