Robert
Bly was born in western Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian stock.
He enlisted in the Navy in 1944 and spent two years there. After one
year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard and
thereby joined the famous group of writers who were undergraduates at
that time, which included Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch,
John Ashbery, Harold Brodky, George Plimpton, and John Hawkes. He graduated
in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York living, as they say,
hand to mouth.
Beginning
in 1954, he took two years at the University of Iowa at the Writers
Workshop along with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and others. In
1956 he received a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway and translate
Norwegian poetry into English. While there he found not only his relatives
but the work of a number of major poets whose force was not present
in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Gunnar
Ekelof, Georg Trakl and Harry Martinson. He determined then to start
a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States and
so begin The Fifties and The Sixties and The Seventies, which introduced
many of these poets to the writers of his generation, and published
as well essays on American poets and insults to those deserving. During
this time he lived on a farm in Minnesota with his wife and children.
In 1966 he
co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and led much of
the opposition among writers to that war. When he won the National Book
Award for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money
to the Resistance. During the 70s he published eleven books of poetry,
essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic
poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 80s he published Loving
a Woman in Two Worlds, The Wingéd Life: Selected Poems and Prose
of Thoreau,The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and A Little Book on the
Human Shadow.
His work
Iron John: A Book About Men is an international bestseller which has
been translated into many languages. He frequently does workshops for
men with James Hillman and others, and workshops for men and women with
Marion Woodman.
Robert Bly (born
December 231926 in Madison, Minnesota) is a United States poet. He was
educated at St. Olaf, Harvard, and the University of Iowa.