Bly, Robert (Vol. 128) - Introduction

Robert Bly 1926-

（Full name Robert Elwood Bly） American poet, critic, nonfiction writer, editor, and translator.

The following entry presents an overview of Bly's career through 1996. For further information of his life and works, see CLC, Volumes 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, and 38.

INTRODUCTION

A charismatic literary impresario, social critic, and spiritual father of the contemporary men's movement, Robert Bly is among the most prominent and influential American poets of the postwar generation. During the 1960s, he emerged as a leading proponent of “deep imagism,” a school of poetry distinguished for its preoccupation with the surrealism, Jungian archetypes, and elemental description of the natural world and visionary emotional states. His first two collections of poetry, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962) and The Light Around the Body (1967), an award-winning volume of antiwar poetry, established Bly as a major contemporary poet and passionate spokesperson for the healing powers of literature and myth. A popular guest on public television and at writing workshops, poetry readings, and men's gatherings, Bly is credited with rejuvenating public interest in poetry and the imaginative arts. His best-selling book about male initiation, Iron John (1990), catapulted him to the forefront of the men's movement and its attendant controversies. The prolific author of literary criticism, translations, and anthologies, Bly's best-selling dissertation on American culture, The Sibling Society (1996), also appealed to a broad mainstream audience.

Biographical Information

Born Robert Elwood Bly in rural Madison, Minnesota, Bly was raised on a nearby farm operated by his father. After graduating from high school, he served in the United States Navy from 1944 to 1946. Discharged at the conclusion of the Second World War, he attended St. Olaf College in Minnesota for a year, then transferred to Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in English literature in 1950. While at Harvard, Bly served as editor of the Harvard Advocate, the campus literary magazine in which he published his first essays and poetry. Several of his classmates at Harvard, poets Donald Hall, John Ashbery, and Frank O'Hara, also went on to literary fame. After leaving Harvard, Bly lived and wrote in an isolated North Minnesota cabin before relocating to New York City, where he worked menial jobs while concentrating on his writing and self-education in philosophy and foreign languages. He then pursued graduate studies at the University of Iowa, where he earned a master's degree in creative writing in 1956. Bly married writer Carol McLean in 1955. In 1956 he received a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway, his ancestral homeland, where he translated and studied Scandinavian poetry. Returning to the United States the next year, he settled on a Minnesota farm and founded The Fifties, a literary magazine devoted to translations of foreign works and poetry that rejected the formalism of T. S. Eliot and Allen Tate. The magazine was retitled The Sixties and The Seventies, in subsequent decades.

With the publication of his first volume of poetry, Silence in the Snowy Fields, Bly received growing critical recognition. In 1964 he was awarded an Amy Lowell fellowship and the first of two Guggenheim fellowships; he received a second Guggenheim in 1972. He also received a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1965 and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1967. His second volume of poetry, The Light Around the Body, won a National Book Award in 1968. During the late 1960s, Bly became increasingly active in political and social causes. In 1966 he helped organize American Writers Against the Vietnam War, a protest group that conducted poetry “read-ins” on college campuses throughout the country. He was arrested during a 1967 rally at the Pentagon. While living in Minnesota, Bly maintained a steady output of poetry over the next two decades, including the volumes Sleepers Joining Hands (1973), This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (1979), The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), and Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1987). He also published translations of the poetry that influenced his own work, notably that of Rainer Maria Rilke, Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, and the fifteenth-century Indian mystic Kabir. Bly divorced his first wife in 1979 and remarried Jungian analyst Ruth Counsell the next year. During the 1980s, Bly became interested in the psychological and spiritual rehabilitation of men, culminating in the 1990 publication of Iron John, its companion videotape A Gathering of Men (1990), and a PBS interview with Bill Moyers that established him as a leading figure of the men's movement.

Major Works

Bly's “deep image” poetry is largely concerned with unconscious awareness, spiritual revelation, and solitary communion with the natural world. Reacting against the intellectualized academic verse of the 1950s, particularly the emphasis on technical virtuosity and artifice, Bly sought to infuse contemporary American poetry with emotionalism and spontaneity achieved through free association and nonrational subjectivity. His important early essays, “A Wrong Turning in American Poetry” and “Looking for Dragon Smoke,” evince his strong opposition to the strictures of formalism and the devaluation of imagery which he attributed to the critical theories of T. S. Eliot. The “country poems” of Bly's first volume, Silence in the Snowy Fields, introduce the pastoral Midwest landscapes, surreal observations, and direct, personal idiom of his subsequent work. As does much of his writing, many of these poems feature a moment of awestruck clarity in which the speaker revels in private harmony with the world. One of his best-known poems from this volume, “Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River,” relates the speaker's euphoric connectedness to the weathered Minnesota landscape while returning home at dusk. In another, “Poem in Three Parts,” the speaker declares, “Oh, on an early morning I think I shall live forever! / I am wrapped in my joyful flesh.”

The Light Around the Body, a much different collection, marks Bly's attempt to merge the personal and public in his art, resulting in a new didacticism that became a prominent feature of his work. In these overtly political poems, Bly adopts a polemical tone to condemn U.S. foreign policy and military involvement in Vietnam. Poems such as “Listening to President Kennedy Lie About the Cuban Invasion” and “Hatred of Men with Black Hair” express Bly's psychic despair over betrayals of conscience associated with American imperialism and the degradation of war. His next major volume of poetry, Sleepers Joining Hands, also contains powerful references to the Vietnam War, notably in “The Teeth Mother Naked at Last,” though returns to the more serene style of Silence in the Snowy Fields. Informed by his study of Jungian psychology, many of these poems express Bly's disdain for masculine elements of the subconscious associated with aggression, morality, and analytic reasoning. In “I Came Out of the Mother Naked,” an essay from this volume, Bly extols the virtues of the Great Mother culture that preceded patriarchal ascendancy in the ancient world. With This Tree Will Be Here For a Thousand Years Bly returned to the bucolic settings and visionary transformations of Silence in the Snowy Fields. Focusing on the duality of consciousness, these poems embody Bly's effort to unite the inner and outer realms of experience, often resulting in a melancholy realization of emptiness and loss. In The Man in the Black Coat Turns, which includes several prose poems, Bly turned his attention to father-son relationships, the primal bonds of parentage, and male sorrow, reflecting a return to masculine awareness and Bly's need to reconcile with his own alcoholic father. Loving a Woman in Two Worlds explores themes of love, intimacy, and the possibility of cosmic union in human relationships. Typical of his poetry, the meditative imagery of stars, water, trees, farms, and wildlife suggests a profound, hidden knowledge in all things.

In Iron John, an interpretative study of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale of the same title, Bly presents his ideas about masculinity and the importance of folk tradition, mentoring, and ritual initiation for the healthy socialization of men. In the fable that frames Bly's commentary a young prince is abducted by a frightening “Wild Man” named Iron John and educated far from his parents in the mysterious depths of the forest, where he learns the virtues of self-discipline, fortitude, and courage. Drawing broadly upon insights from mythology, psychology, social science, and poetry, Bly contends that the modern “soft male” is afflicted with self-destructive grief, anger, and passivity stemming from a lack of guidance from older men and over-identification with feminine traits. Bly expands upon similar themes in The Sibling Society, a sociological treatise in which he links the decline of American culture, education, and civil discourse with a state of perpetual adolescence fostered by youth-oriented cultural values that encourage immediate gratification, self-centeredness, and disposable relationships. As Bly observes, adults are unwilling to accept their responsibilities as role models and leaders, and children, witnessing the inadequacies of their immature parents, do not aspire to become adults. As in Iron John, Bly stresses the significance of intergenerational mentoring and underscores his message with wide-ranging anecdotes from myth, folklore, and psychology.

Critical Reception

Bly is widely recognized as a gifted poet, provocative social commentator, and captivating public speaker whose advocacy of spiritual introspection and creativity is responsible for a resurgence of popular interest in contemporary poetry. He has been compared to Henry David Thoreau for his individualism and transcendental vision, to Ezra Pound for his broad literary influence, and to Joseph Campbell as a popularizer of world mythology. Though few dismiss Bly's considerable intelligence and remarkable ability to convey the excitement of poetic expression to a general audience, critical evaluation of his own poetry is mixed. While many praise the meditative simplicity, luminous imagery, and colloquial voice of Bly's verse, others find fault in his tendency toward sentimentality, banality, and empty exhortation. Most regard Silence in the Snowy Fields and The Light Around the Body as his most significant works, though he has also garnered critical approval for The Man in the Black Coat Turns, Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, and his Selected Poems (1986), which includes several new compositions and prefatory remarks. With the enormous success of Iron John, Bly won a mass readership and celebrity as a leading spokesperson of the men's movement in America. While reviewers appreciated Bly's perceptive analysis of sexual identity and the demoralization of men in post-industrial society, many objected to Bly's patriarchal assumptions about traditional sex roles, his deprecation of motherhood, and ambiguous promotion of “fierceness” among men, considered by some an implicit threat to feminism. Despite such controversy, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes, “In terms of what it tries to accomplish, Mr. Bly's book is important and timely.” Bly's subsequent nonfiction study, The Sibling Society, was similarly praised for its ambitious subject, though some reviewers noted flaws in its methodology and unsubstantiated claims. As Winifred Gallagher concludes, “In an age of experts and specialization, Bly's eclectic jeremiad, drawn from politics, folk tales, behavioral science, economics and mythology, is testament to the kind of everyman's literacy and love of learning he mourns.”