Author, poet, translator started a men’s movement
Robert Bly, the Minnesota poet, author and translator who articulated the solitude of landscapes, galvanized protests against the Vietnam War and started a controversial men’s movement with a bestseller that called for a restoration of primal male audacity, died Sunday at his home in Minneapolis. He was 94.
The death was confirmed by his wife, Ruth Bly.
From the sheer volume of his output — more than 50 books of poetry; translations of European and Latin American writers; and nonfiction commentaries on literature, gender roles and social ills, as well as poetry magazines he edited for decades — one might imagine a recluse holed up in a Northwoods cabin. And Bly did live for many years in a small town in Minnesota, immersing himself in the poetry of silent fields and snowy woodlands.
But from relative obscurity he roared into national consciousness in the 1960s, with anti-war free verse that attacked President Lyndon Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Gen. William Westmoreland, the commander in Vietnam.
In 1966, Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and toured the country, rallying the opposition with poetry “read-ins” on campuses and in town halls. He won the National Book Award for poetry for The Light Around
the Body (1967) and donated his $1,000 prize to the draft resistance.
Taking another abrupt turn in 1990, he published what was to become his most famous work,
Iron John: A Book About Men, which drew on myths, legends, poetry and science of a sort to make a case that American men had grown soft and feminized and needed to rediscover their primitive virtues of ferocity and audacity and thus regain the self-confidence to be nurturing fathers and mentors.
The book touched a nerve. It was on the New York Times’ bestseller list for 62 weeks, including 10 weeks as No. 1, and was translated into many languages.
Bly was profiled in newspapers, magazines and a 90-minute PBS special by Bill Moyers, who called him “the most influential poet writing today.” He became a cultural phenomenon, a father figure to millions. He held men-only seminars and weekend retreats, gatherings often in the woods with men around campfires thumping drums, making masks, hugging, dancing and reading poetry aloud.
He said his “mythopoetic men’s movement” was not intended to turn men against women. But many women called it a put-down, an atavistic reaction to the feminist movement. Cartoonists and talk-show hosts ridiculed it, dismissing it as tree-hugging self-indulgence by middle-class baby boomers. Bly, a shambling white-haired guru who strummed a bouzouki and wore colorful vests, was easily mocked as Iron John himself, a hairy wild man who, in the German myth, helped aimless princes in their quests.
Undismayed, he continued his workshops for years with a more down-to-earth focus. He gave up the drums but still used myths and poetry and invited women and men to discuss an array of topics, including parenting and racism.