The anti-war poet who launched a men’s movement
Robert Bly 1926–2021
When Robert Bly published Iron John: A Book About Men in 1990, he was already a celebrated poet and literary figure. That nonfiction work would transform Bly into something bigger: a household name. Drawing on myths, ancient religions, and Jungian psychology, he argued that modern men, lacking rites of initiation into manhood and guidance from absent fathers, had become feminized and needed to reconnect with their “interior warrior.” His international best-seller launched a movement that sent scores of men into the woods to bang on drums and dance around fires. The movement prompted many a wisecrack and backlash from feminists who called it regressive, but Bly said critics missed the point. “The media reduced it to something ridiculous,” he said. But the “men we saw took a deep interest in poetry and mythology. I thought it was beautiful.”
Raised on his family’s farm in western Minnesota, Bly described his father as an alcoholic who “preferred a bottle to us,” said The Washington Post. Bly enlisted in the Navy at the end of World
War II and then enrolled at Harvard, where he vowed to devote his life to poetry after reading read a poem by Yeats. Following his graduation, “he spent four years writing in New York City with little success,” said the Minneapolis Star Tribune, then married and moved to a farmhouse without running water “a half-mile from where he grew up.” Declaring most published verse “too old-fashioned,” Bly and a partner founded the literary magazine The Fifties in 1958, printing “avant-garde poetry and poets in translation.” His first collection, the pastoral Silence in the Snowy Fields, was published in 1962.
Bly’s second collection “established his reputation as an important American poet,” said the Los Angeles Times. The Light Around the Body (1967) was “a fiery anti-war collection” that “mercilessly attacked foreign policy.” He co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and gave wild “read-ins” on college campuses, often wearing a mask or colorful shawl while reciting poetry and cracking jokes. Iron John’s success turned Bly into a “cultural phenomenon,” said The New York Times. He led seminars and weekend retreats, undaunted by those who ridiculed them as “tree-hugging self-indulgence by middle-class Baby Boomers.” Bly continued “to write rivers of poetry” late into life. He made his last public appearance in Minneapolis in 2015, where he read “Keeping Our Small Boat Afloat,” a meditation on aging and mortality. “Each of us deserves to be forgiven,” he read, “if only for / Our persistence in keeping our small boat afloat / When so many have gone down in the storm.”