31 Facts About Robert Bly

Robert Elwood Bly was an American poet, essayist, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement.

Robert Bly's best-known prose book is Iron John: A Book About Men, which spent 62 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, and is a key text of the mythopoetic men's movement.

Robert Bly won the 1968 National Book Award for Poetry for his book The Light Around the Body.

Robert Bly graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York.

Robert Bly lived on a farm in Minnesota with his wife Carol, whom he married in 1955, and their four children.

Carol Robert Bly was a writer, winning awards for her short stories and novels.

In 1980, Robert Bly married Ruth Counsell and became the stepfather to her two children.

Robert Bly died at his home in Minneapolis on November 21,2021, at the age of 94.

Robert Bly believed this approach was instigated by the Modernists and formed the aesthetic of most post-World War II American poetry.

Robert Bly criticized the influence of American-born Modernists such as T S Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams, and argued that American poetry needed to model itself on the more inward-looking work of European and South American poets like Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Antonio Machado, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

In 1966, Robert Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and was among the leaders of the opposition to that war among writers.

Robert Bly's 1970 poem "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last", later collected in his book Sleepers Joining Hands, is a major contribution to anti-war poetry of the Vietnam War era.

Robert Bly celebrated the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling.

Robert Bly maintained a friendly correspondence with Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves.

Robert Bly wrote The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine with Marion Woodman.

Robert Bly published a poetry anthology titled The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, with James Hillman and Michael Meade co-editing.

Robert Bly was the University of Minnesota Library's 2002 Distinguished Writer.

Robert Bly received the McKnight Foundation's Distinguished Artist Award in 2000, and the Maurice English Poetry Award in 2002.

Robert Bly has published more than 40 collections of poetry, edited many others, and published translations of poetry and prose from such languages as Swedish, Norwegian, German, Spanish, Persian and Urdu.

Robert Bly edited the prestigious Best American Poetry 1999.

In February 2008, Robert Bly was named Minnesota's first poet laureate.

Robert Bly begins the book with seven poems he calls "The Old Position", which are poems from the 18th century which "dismissed nature as defective because it lacks reason".

Much of Robert Bly's prose writing focuses on what he saw as the particularly troubled situation in which many males find themselves today.

Robert Bly understood this to be a result of, among other things, the decline of traditional fathering which left young boys unguided through the stages of life leading to maturity.

Robert Bly claimed that in contrast with women who are better informed by their bodies, men need to be actively guided out of boyhood and into manhood by their elders.

Robert Bly therefore saw today's men as half-adults, trapped between boyhood and maturity, in a state where they find it hard to become responsible in their work as well as leaders in their communities.

Historically this represents a recent shift from a traditional patriarchal model and Robert Bly believes that women rushed to fill the gap that was formed through the various youth movements during the 1960s, enhancing men's emotional capacities and helping them to connect with women's age-old pain of repression.

Robert Bly researched and collected myths that concern male maturity, often originating from the Grimms' Fairy Tales and published them in various books, Iron John being the best known example.

Robert Bly noticed that a cultural space existed in most traditional societies for such a period in a man's life, in the absence of which, many men today go into a depression and alcoholism as they subconsciously try to emulate this innate ritual.

Robert Bly was influenced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung who developed the theory of archetypes, the discrete structures of the Psyche which emerge as images in dreams, myths, and art.

The Powerful King, the Evil Witch and the Beautiful Maiden are, according to Jung, some of the imprints of the collective unconscious and Robert Bly wrote extensively about their meaning and relations to modern life.