Robert Bly
Encyclopedia
Robert Bly is an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.
, to Jacob and Alice Bly, who were of Norwegian ancestry. Following graduation from high school in 1944, he enlisted in the United States Navy, serving two years. After one year at St. Olaf College
in Minnesota
, he transferred to Harvard University
, joining the later famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, including Donald Hall
, Adrienne Rich
, Kenneth Koch
, Frank O'Hara
, John Ashbery
, Harold Brodkey
, George Plimpton
and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York.
Beginning in 1954, Bly took two years at the University of Iowa
at the Iowa 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 became acquainted with the work of a number of major poets whose work was barely known in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda
, Cesar Vallejo
, Antonio Machado
, Gunnar Ekelof
, Georg Trakl
, Rumi, Hafez, Kabir
, Mirabai, and Harry Martinson
. Bly determined then to start a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States. The Fifties, The Sixties, and The Seventies, introduced many of these poets to the writers of his generation. He also published essays on American poets.
During this time, Bly lived on a farm in Minnesota, with his wife and children. His first marriage was to award-winning short story novelist Carol Bly
. They had four children, including Mary Bly
, a Literature Professor at Fordham University
and also a best-selling novelist. Bly and Carol divorced in 1979; Bly has been married to the former Ruth Ray since 1980. He has a stepdaughter and stepson through this marriage, although the stepson died in a pedestrian-train incident.
", an essay in which he made a case against the influences of Eliot
, Pound
, Marianne Moore
, and William Carlos Williams
, in favour of the more direct work of writers such as Pablo Neruda
, César Vallejo
, Juan Ramón Jiménez
, Antonio Machado
, and Rainer Maria Rilke
.
In 1966, Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War
, and went on to lead much of the opposition to that war among writers. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the war. When he won the National Book Award
for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the Resistance. During the 1970s, he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 1980s 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.During the sixties he was of great help to the Bengali Hungryalist poets who faced anti-establishment trial at Kolkata, India.
Among his most famous works is Iron John: A Book About Men
, an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages. The book is credited with starting the Mythopoetic men's movement in the United States. Bly frequently conducts workshops for men with James Hillman
, Michael J. Meade
, and others, as well as workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman
. He has taught at the annual Great Mother Conference since 1975. He maintains a friendly correspondence with Clarissa Pinkola Estés
, author of Women Who Run With the Wolves.
Bly was the University of Minnesota
Library's 2002 Distinguished Writer. He received The McKnight Foundation's Distinguished Artist Award in 2000, and the Maurice English Poetry Award in 2002. He 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
. His book The Night Abraham Called to the Stars was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. He also edited the prestigious Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribners).
In 2006 the University of Minnesota
purchased Bly's archive, which contained more than 80,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts; a journal spanning nearly 50 years; notebooks of his "morning poems"; drafts of translations; hundreds of audio and videotapes, and correspondence with many writers such as James Wright
, Donald Hall
and James Dickey
. The archive is housed at Elmer L. Andersen Library on the University of Minnesota
campus. The university paid $775,000 from school funds and private donors.
In February, 2008, Bly was named Minnesota's first poet laureate. In that year he also contributed a poem and an Afterword to From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright.
Bly therefore sees today's men as half adults, trapped somewhere between childhood and maturity, a state in which they find it hard to become responsible leaders, carers and fathers, which in turn leads to the passing down of that immaturity through the generations. In his book The Sibling Society
(1997), Bly argues that a society formed mainly by half adults is extremely problematic as it lacks in leadership, daring initiative, creativity and a deep care about others. The image of weak men, he argues, is further enhanced by popular media and Hollywood films which often present fathers as overweight and emotionally co-dependent. Women, according to Bly, rushed to fill the gap during the 1960s, infusing men with an enhanced emotional sensitivity which in itself was good to the extent that it helped men to better understand women and start feeling their age old pain of repression, but also led to the creation of 'soft males' which lacked the outwardly directed strength to revitalize the community with assertiveness and a certain warrior strength.
In Bly's view, one solution lies in the rediscovery of the meanings hidden in traditional mythology that have hopefully been passed down to us but are in danger of being forgotten. He researched and collected myths he considered to focus on male maturity and published them in various books, Iron John being the most notable example, many coming from the Grimm's
fairytales. Descent is a common theme arising in these myths, variously presented as the hero going underground to pass a period of solitude in a somewhat bestial mode. He often used the Greek term for 'descent' (κατάβασης) to describe the maturing process for men, in contrast with the continuous achievements they have been taught to pursue by today's culture.
Bly was also influenced by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung
who developed the theory archetypes, the discrete psychic structures, perceived as images, that exist within the human Psyche. The Powerful King, the Evil Witch and the Beautiful Maiden are, according to Jung, images imprinted in the collective unconscious that Robert Bly wrote extensively about. As an example, he considered the Witch to be that part of the male psyche upon which all the negative and destructive side of women is imprinted, first developed to store his own mother's imperfections. As a consequence, the Witch's symbols are essentially inverted motherly symbols, where cooking becomes the brewing of evil potions, weaving takes the form of spiders' web and feeding is reversed, with the child now in danger of being eaten rather than fed. In that respect, the Witch is a mark of arrested development on the part of the man and has yet to be incorporated in the man's psyche to form a coherent and healthy whole. Many fairytales describe the psychic battle of incorporation in physical terms, with the hero saving his future bride by killing a witch, as in the Grimm's story "The Drummer". These concepts are recounted in Bly's talk The Human Shadow (1989) and the book it was presenting.
Life
Bly was born in Lac qui Parle County, MinnesotaLac qui Parle County, Minnesota
As of the census of 2000, there were 8,067 people, 3,316 households, and 2,225 families residing in the county. The population density was 10 people per square mile . There were 3,774 housing units at an average density of 5 per square mile...
, to Jacob and Alice Bly, who were of Norwegian ancestry. Following graduation from high school in 1944, he enlisted in the United States Navy, serving two years. After one year at St. Olaf College
St. Olaf College
St. Olaf College is a coeducational, residential, four-year, private liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota, United States. It was founded in 1874 by a group of Norwegian-American immigrant pastors and farmers, led by Pastor Bernt Julius Muus. The college is named after Olaf II of Norway,...
in Minnesota
Minnesota
Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...
, he transferred to Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, joining the later famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, including Donald Hall
Donald Hall
Donald Hall is an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2006.-Personal life:...
, Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Cecile Rich is an American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century."-Early life:...
, Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77...
, Frank O'Hara
Frank O'Hara
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet and art critic. He was a member of the New York School of poetry.-Life:...
, John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...
, Harold Brodkey
Harold Brodkey
Harold Brodkey, born Aaron Roy Weintraub was an American writer, and novelist.-Life:Brodkey was raised in University City, Missouri outside St. Louis...
, George Plimpton
George Plimpton
George Ames Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, editor, and actor. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review.-Early life:...
and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York.
Beginning in 1954, Bly took two years at the University of Iowa
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...
at the Iowa Writers Workshop along with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice
Donald Justice
Donald Justice was an American poet and teacher of writing. In summing up Justice's career, David Orr has written, "In most ways, Justice was no different from any number of solid, quiet older writers devoted to traditional short poems. But he was different in one important sense: sometimes his...
, and others. In 1956, he received a Fulbright Grant
Fulbright Program
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright-Hays Program, is a program of competitive, merit-based grants for international educational exchange for students, scholars, teachers, professionals, scientists and artists, founded by United States Senator J. William Fulbright in 1946. Under the...
to travel to Norway
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
and translate Norwegian poetry
Norwegian literature
Norwegian literature is literature composed in Norway or by Norwegian people. The history of Norwegian literature starts with the pagan Eddaic poems and skaldic verse of the 9th and 10th centuries with poets such as Bragi Boddason and Eyvindr Skáldaspillir...
into English. While there, he found not only his relatives, but became acquainted with the work of a number of major poets whose work was barely known in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda....
, Cesar Vallejo
César Vallejo
César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet. Although he published only three books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante"...
, Antonio Machado
Antonio Machado
Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz, known as Antonio Machado was a Spanish poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation of '98....
, Gunnar Ekelof
Gunnar Ekelöf
Gunnar Ekelöf was a Swedish poet and writer. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1958. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy by Uppsala University in 1958...
, Georg Trakl
Georg Trakl
Georg Trakl was an Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most important Austrian Expressionists.- Life and work :Trakl was born and lived the first 18 years of his life in Salzburg, Austria...
, Rumi, Hafez, Kabir
Kabir
Kabīr was a mystic poet and saint of India, whose writings have greatly influenced the Bhakti movement...
, Mirabai, and Harry Martinson
Harry Martinson
Harry Martinson was a Swedish sailor, author and poet. In 1949 he was elected into the Swedish Academy. He was awarded a joint Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974 together with fellow Swede Eyvind Johnson. The choice for Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson was very controversial as both were on the...
. Bly determined then to start a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States. The Fifties, The Sixties, and The Seventies, introduced many of these poets to the writers of his generation. He also published essays on American poets.
During this time, Bly lived on a farm in Minnesota, with his wife and children. His first marriage was to award-winning short story novelist Carol Bly
Carol Bly
Carol Bly was a teacher and an award-winning American author of short stories, essays, and nonfiction works on writing...
. They had four children, including Mary Bly
Mary Bly
Mary Bly is a tenured associate professor of English Literature at Fordham University who also writes best-selling Regency romance novels under the pen name Eloisa James.She is the daughter of poet Robert Bly and short-story author Carol Bly....
, a Literature Professor at Fordham University
Fordham University
Fordham University is a private, nonprofit, coeducational research university in the United States, with three campuses in and around New York City. It was founded by the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York in 1841 as St...
and also a best-selling novelist. Bly and Carol divorced in 1979; Bly has been married to the former Ruth Ray since 1980. He has a stepdaughter and stepson through this marriage, although the stepson died in a pedestrian-train incident.
Career
Bly's early collection of poems, Silence in the Snowy Fields, was published in 1962, and its plain, imagistic style had considerable influence on American verse of the next two decades. The following year, he published "A Wrong Turning in American PoetryA Wrong Turning in American Poetry
A Wrong Turning in American Poetry is an essay by United States poet Robert Bly which was first published in Choice 3 in 1963 and collected in American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity. It has subsequently been anthologized in Twentieth-Century American Poetics...
", an essay in which he made a case against the influences of Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit.- Life :Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in the manse of the Presbyterian church where her maternal grandfather, John Riddle Warner, served as pastor. She was the daughter of mechanical engineer and inventor...
, and William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, in favour of the more direct work of writers such as Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda....
, César Vallejo
César Vallejo
César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet. Although he published only three books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante"...
, Juan Ramón Jiménez
Juan Ramón Jiménez
Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón was a Spanish poet, a prolific writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956. One of Jiménez's most important contributions to modern poetry was his advocacy of the French concept of "pure poetry."-Biography:Jiménez was born in Moguer, near Huelva, in...
, Antonio Machado
Antonio Machado
Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz, known as Antonio Machado was a Spanish poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation of '98....
, and Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke , better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language...
.
In 1966, Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War
American Writers Against the Vietnam War
American Writers Against the Vietnam War was an umbrella organization created in 1965 by American poets Robert Bly and David Ray. The group organized readings, meetings and joined in rallies, teach-ins, and demonstrations against the Vietnam War, allowing writers to protest under a collective...
, and went on to lead much of the opposition to that war among writers. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the war. When he won the National Book Award
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...
for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the Resistance. During the 1970s, he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 1980s 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.During the sixties he was of great help to the Bengali Hungryalist poets who faced anti-establishment trial at Kolkata, India.
Among his most famous works is Iron John: A Book About Men
Iron John: A Book About Men
Iron John: A Book About Men is a book by American poet Robert Bly published in 1990 by Addison-Wesley.It analyzes Iron John, a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, in Joseph Campbell fashion, to find lessons especially meaningful to men...
, an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages. The book is credited with starting the Mythopoetic men's movement in the United States. Bly frequently conducts workshops for men with James Hillman
James Hillman
James Hillman was an American psychologist. He studied at, and then guided studies for, the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, founded a movement toward archetypal psychology and retired into private practice, writing and traveling to lecture, until his death at his home in Connecticut on October 27,...
, Michael J. Meade
Michael J. Meade
Michael J. Meade was a figure in the Men's Movement of the 1980s and 1990s.His essays have appeared in To Be A Man, Tending the Fire, Wingspan, Walking Swiftly, and The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. The latter is an anthology of poetry, which he edited with Robert Bly and James Hillman...
, and others, as well as workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman
Marion Woodman
Marion Woodman is a Canadian mythopoetic author and women's movement figure. She is a Jungian analyst trained at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, Switzerland. She is one of the most widely read authors on feminine psychology, focusing on psyche and soma. She is also an international lecturer...
. He has taught at the annual Great Mother Conference since 1975. He maintains a friendly correspondence with Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Clarissa Pinkola Estés is an American poet, post-trauma specialist and Jungian psychoanalyst.-Biography:Similar to William Carlos Williams and other poets who also worked in the health or other professions in tandem, Estés is a poet who uses her poems throughout her psychoanalytic books,...
, author of Women Who Run With the Wolves.
Bly was the University of Minnesota
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
Library's 2002 Distinguished Writer. He received The McKnight Foundation's Distinguished Artist Award in 2000, and the Maurice English Poetry Award in 2002. He 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
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
and Urdu
Urdu
Urdu is a register of the Hindustani language that is identified with Muslims in South Asia. It belongs to the Indo-European family. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also widely spoken in some regions of India, where it is one of the 22 scheduled languages and an...
. His book The Night Abraham Called to the Stars was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. He also edited the prestigious Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribners).
In 2006 the University of Minnesota
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
purchased Bly's archive, which contained more than 80,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts; a journal spanning nearly 50 years; notebooks of his "morning poems"; drafts of translations; hundreds of audio and videotapes, and correspondence with many writers such as James Wright
James Wright (poet)
James Arlington Wright was an American poet.Wright first emerged on the literary scene in 1956 with The Green Wall, a collection of formalist verse that was awarded the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. But by the early 1960s, Wright, increasingly influenced by the Spanish language...
, Donald Hall
Donald Hall
Donald Hall is an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2006.-Personal life:...
and James Dickey
James Dickey
James Lafayette Dickey was an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966.-Early years:...
. The archive is housed at Elmer L. Andersen Library on the University of Minnesota
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
campus. The university paid $775,000 from school funds and private donors.
In February, 2008, Bly was named Minnesota's first poet laureate. In that year he also contributed a poem and an Afterword to From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright.
Thought and the Men's Movement
Much of Bly's writing focuses on what he perceived as the deeply troubled situation in which most men find themselves in western societies today. This he understood to be a result of, among other things, the decline of the father's role in the modern family. He claimed that whereas women are helped by their own bodies along the stages of maturity, men are somewhat of an "experimental species" and have to be taught on what it is to be a man. Older cultures had elaborate myths, enacted through rites of passage, that helped men along this path as well as the concept of a "men's societie" as a place where older men would teach young boys on these gender specific issues. He argues that these rituals are as important to humans as instincts are to animals and as fathers became increasingly absent from the house during and after the industrial revolution, young males did not receive the teachings that they used to. According to Bly, many of the phenomena of depression, juvenile delinquency and lack of leadership in business and politics have their roots in these problems.Bly therefore sees today's men as half adults, trapped somewhere between childhood and maturity, a state in which they find it hard to become responsible leaders, carers and fathers, which in turn leads to the passing down of that immaturity through the generations. In his book The Sibling Society
The Sibling Society
The Sibling Society is a book by poet, activist and author Robert Bly, published in 1996. The book argues that modern men face difficulties caused by an inability to reach full maturity, and discusses the consequences this has for the societies in which they live....
(1997), Bly argues that a society formed mainly by half adults is extremely problematic as it lacks in leadership, daring initiative, creativity and a deep care about others. The image of weak men, he argues, is further enhanced by popular media and Hollywood films which often present fathers as overweight and emotionally co-dependent. Women, according to Bly, rushed to fill the gap during the 1960s, infusing men with an enhanced emotional sensitivity which in itself was good to the extent that it helped men to better understand women and start feeling their age old pain of repression, but also led to the creation of 'soft males' which lacked the outwardly directed strength to revitalize the community with assertiveness and a certain warrior strength.
In Bly's view, one solution lies in the rediscovery of the meanings hidden in traditional mythology that have hopefully been passed down to us but are in danger of being forgotten. He researched and collected myths he considered to focus on male maturity and published them in various books, Iron John being the most notable example, many coming from the Grimm's
Brothers Grimm
The Brothers Grimm , Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm , were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, and authors who collected folklore and published several collections of it as Grimm's Fairy Tales, which became very popular...
fairytales. Descent is a common theme arising in these myths, variously presented as the hero going underground to pass a period of solitude in a somewhat bestial mode. He often used the Greek term for 'descent' (κατάβασης) to describe the maturing process for men, in contrast with the continuous achievements they have been taught to pursue by today's culture.
Bly was also influenced by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung
Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and the founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and...
who developed the theory archetypes, the discrete psychic structures, perceived as images, that exist within the human Psyche. The Powerful King, the Evil Witch and the Beautiful Maiden are, according to Jung, images imprinted in the collective unconscious that Robert Bly wrote extensively about. As an example, he considered the Witch to be that part of the male psyche upon which all the negative and destructive side of women is imprinted, first developed to store his own mother's imperfections. As a consequence, the Witch's symbols are essentially inverted motherly symbols, where cooking becomes the brewing of evil potions, weaving takes the form of spiders' web and feeding is reversed, with the child now in danger of being eaten rather than fed. In that respect, the Witch is a mark of arrested development on the part of the man and has yet to be incorporated in the man's psyche to form a coherent and healthy whole. Many fairytales describe the psychic battle of incorporation in physical terms, with the hero saving his future bride by killing a witch, as in the Grimm's story "The Drummer". These concepts are recounted in Bly's talk The Human Shadow (1989) and the book it was presenting.
Poetry collections
- Talking into the Ear of a Donkey: Poems (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011)
- Turkish Pears in August: Twenty-Four Ramages (Eastern Washington University, 2007)
- The Urge to Travel Long Distances (Eastern Washington University Press, 2005)
- My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy (HarperCollins, 2005)
- Surprised by Evening (RealNewMusic, 2005)
- The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (HarperCollins, 2001)
- Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems (1999)
- Snowbanks North of the House (1999)
- Morning Poems (1997)
- Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (1994)
- What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?: Collected Prose Poems (1992)
- Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985)
- Selected Poems (1986)
- Mirabai Versions (1984)
- The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981)
- This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (1979)
- This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977)
- Old Man Rubbing His Eyes (1974)
- Jumping Out of Bed (1973)
- Sleepers Joining Hands (1973)
- The Light Around the Body (1967)- won National Book AwardNational Book AwardThe National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...
- The Lion's Tail and Eyes (1962)
- Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962)
Translations collections
- The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems of Olav H. Hauge (Copper Canyon PressCopper Canyon PressCopper Canyon Press is an independent, non-profit small press, specializing in the publication of poetry and located in the picturesque town of Port Townsend, Washington. Since 1972, the Press has published poetry exclusively and has established an international reputation for its commitment to...
, 2008) (with Robert Hedin) - Peer Gynt (verse play) - by Henrik Ibsen (2008)
- The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations, HarperCollinsHarperCollinsHarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...
(2004) - The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, Graywolf PressGraywolf PressGraywolf Press is an independent, non-profit publisher located in St. Paul, Minnesota. Founded on a dedication to the creation and promotion of thoughtful and imaginative contemporary literature essential to a vital and diverse culture, Graywolf Press publishes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.Now...
(2001) - The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib (with Sunil Dutta, 1999)
- Lorca and Jiménez: Selected Poems, Beacon PressBeacon PressBeacon Press is an American non-profit book publisher. Founded in 1854 by the American Unitarian Association, it is currently a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association.Beacon Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses....
(1997) - Ten Poems of Francis Ponge Translated by Robert Bly & Ten Poems of Robert Bly Inspired by the Poems of Francis Ponge (1990)
- Trusting Your Life to Water and Eternity: Twenty Poems of Olav H. Hauge (1987)
- Machado's Times Alone: Selected Poems (1983)
- The Kabir Book (1977)
- Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets: Martinson, Ekeloef, and Transtromer (1975)
- Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems (1971)
- Hunger (novel)Hunger (novel)Hunger is a novel by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun and was published in its final form in 1890. Parts of it had been published anonymously in the Danish magazine Ny Jord in 1888. The novel has been hailed as the literary opening of the 20th century and an outstanding example of modern,...
— by Knut Hamsun (1967) - Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke - A Translation from the German and Commentary by Robert Bly (1981)
Anthologies (as editor)
- The Best American Poetry (1999)
- The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures, Ecco PressEcco PressEcco Press is a publishing imprint of HarperCollins, who acquired it in 1999. It was founded in 1971 by Daniel Halpern as an independent publishing company. Until 1994 the press was the publisher of the literary magazine Antaeus.- External links :**...
(1995) - The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford (1993)
- The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: Poems for Men (1992)
- News of the Universe (1980)
- Leaping Poetry (1975)
- A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War (1967)
Nonfiction books
- Remembering James Wright (2005)
- The Maiden King : The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine (with Marion Woodman), Henry Holt & CoHenry Holt and CompanyHenry Holt and Company is an American book publishing company. One of the oldest publishers in the United States, it was founded in 1866 by Henry Holt and Frederick Leypoldt...
(1998) - The Sibling Society, Addison-WesleyAddison-WesleyAddison-Wesley was a book publisher in Boston, Massachusetts, best known for its textbooks and computer literature. As well as publishing books, Addison-Wesley also distributed its technical titles through the Safari Books Online e-reference service...
(1996) - The Spirit Boy and the Insatiable Soul (1994)
- American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (1991)
- Iron John: A Book About MenIron John: A Book About MenIron John: A Book About Men is a book by American poet Robert Bly published in 1990 by Addison-Wesley.It analyzes Iron John, a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, in Joseph Campbell fashion, to find lessons especially meaningful to men...
(1990) - A Little Book on the Human Shadow, (with William Booth, 1988)
- Eight Stages of Translation (1983)
- Talking All Morning: Collected Conversations and Interviews (1980)
See also
- Religion and mythologyReligion and mythologyReligion and mythology differ, but have overlapping aspects. Both terms refer to systems of concepts that are of high importance to a certain community, making statements concerning the supernatural or sacred. Generally, mythology is considered one component or aspect of religion...
- Joseph CampbellJoseph CampbellJoseph John Campbell was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience...
- Mythopoetic Men's Movement
External links
- The Robert Bly Web Site
- Profile and poems of Bly at PoetryFoundation.org
- "Robert Bly reads 'Loon's Cry' " for the WGBH series, New Television Workshop
- Bly profile, The Academy of American Poets
- MenWeb - Men's Issues Interview with Robert Bly
- Modern American Poetry critical essays on Bly's works. University of Illinois
- The Human Shadow and other essays, articles and interviews by Robert Bly. Audio.