He was born in Lac qui Parle county, where his parents, Alice (nee Aws) and Jacob Bly, Norwegian immigrants, were farmers. Yet with his imagistic, often spiritual, poetry, his deep interests in mysticism, his rustic dress and his nasal, high-pitched voice, Bly often seemed an unlikely prophet of masculinity.īly called his poetic technique “deep image”, and his highly visual, quietly surreal poems, often in rural settings, reflected his upbringing in Scandinavian-settled Minnesota. His entire poetic career was thrown into the shadows by the remarkable success of Iron John: A Book About MenĪ meditation on his vision of American manhood being torn from its natural roots because fathers fail to initiate their sons properly into masculinity, Iron John spawned a movement combining encounter-group sensitivity with primal tree-hugging survivalism. But his entire poetic career was thrown into the shadows by the remarkable success of Iron John: A Book About Men (1990). The following year, when he won the National Book award for The Light Around the Body, he donated the prize money to draft resistance. In 1966, he co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War. Like Thoreau, he made his mark with civil disobedience, and later with a hugely popular prose work concerned with the denaturing effects of civilisation.īly’s early poetry in the 60s was his best, although its quality was often subsumed by controversy surrounding his anti-war positions. But Bly is more likely to be seen as a 20th-century parallel to Henry David Thoreau. Just as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s legacy is as an essayist, the influence of Bly’s essays on poetic theory and his many translations have resonated with readers and his fellow poets. For although he was one of the outstanding poets of his generation, Bly, who has died aged 94, may be remembered, like the two most enduring of the original Transcendentalists, for facets of his work other than poetry. It was perceptive to note his link with the New England poets of the 19th century, which was strong, but within a few years it would look absolutely prescient.
In 1986 the New York Times review of Robert Bly’s Selected Poems was headlined “ Minnesota Transcendentalist”.