BLY, ROBERT

born Dec. 23, 1926, Madison, Minn., U.S. in full Robert Elwood Bly American poet, translator, editor, and author. After serving in the U.S. Navy, Bly studied at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota (194647), Harvard University (B.A., 1950), and the University of Iowa (M.A., 1956). In 1958 he cofounded the magazine The Fifties (its name changed with the decades), which published other important young poets and Bly's own translations and serene nature poems. Bly's first collection of poems, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962), was followed by The Light Around the Body, which won a 1968 National Book Award. His later poems and prose poems were published in such volumes as Sleepers Joining Hands (1973), This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977), This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (1979), Morning Poems (1997), and Eating the Honey of Words (1999). Bly also translated the work of many poets, ranging from German, Scandinavian, Spanish, and Latin-American writers to the 15th-century Indian mystic Kabir. His poems of The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981) explore themes of male grief and the father-son connection. These are among the concerns of his best-selling Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), which draws upon myth, legend, folklore, fairy tales, and Jungian psychology to demonstrate his masculinist convictions and which led to a popular men's movement.