Robert Bly obituary – The Guardian

In 1986 the New York Times review of Robert Blys Selected Poems was headlined Minnesota Transcendentalist. 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. 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.

Just as Ralph Waldo Emersons legacy is as an essayist, the influence of Blys essays on poetic theory and his many translations have resonated with readers and his fellow poets. But Bly is more likely to be seen as a 20th-century parallel to Henry David Thoreau. Like Thoreau, he made his mark with civil disobedience, and later with a hugely popular prose work concerned with the denaturing effects of civilisation.

Blys early poetry in the 60s was his best, although its quality was often subsumed by controversy surrounding his anti-war positions. In 1966, he co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War. The following year, when he won the National Book award for The Light Around the Body, he donated the prize money to draft resistance. But his entire poetic career was thrown into the shadows by the remarkable success of Iron John: A Book About Men (1990).

A 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. 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.

Bly called his poetic technique deep image, and his highly visual, quietly surreal poems, often in rural settings, reflected his upbringing in Scandinavian-settled Minnesota. He was born in Lac qui Parle county, where his parents, Alice (nee Aws) and Jacob Bly, Norwegian immigrants, were farmers. At 18, after graduating from high school in Madison, he enlisted in the US navy.

Discharged in 1946, he enrolled at St Olafs College in Northfield, Minnesota, but after a year transferred to Harvard, where he joined a precocious group of undergraduate writers, including John Ashbery, Richard Wilbur, John Hawkes, George Plimpton and, at Radcliffe, Adrienne Rich. It was at Harvard that he read a poem by WB Yeats, and resolved to be a poet for the rest of my life.

After graduation in 1950, he moved to New York, writing and struggling to support himself with a succession of menial jobs and meagre disability payments for the rheumatic fever he contracted while in the navy.

In 1954, he returned to the midwest, as a graduate student in the University of Iowas writers programme, teaching to pay his way. Again he found himself in a writers hothouse; his fellow students included Philip Levine, Donald Justice and WD Snodgrass, with Robert Lowell and John Berryman on the faculty. The proliferation of creative writing programmes on American campuses today owes much to the collective success of this group, the level of which, it could be argued, has never been repeated.

He married the writer Carol McLean in 1955, and returned to Minnesota. The next year, he received a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway to translate poetry. There he discovered not only such Swedish poets as Tomas Transtrmer, Gunnar Ekelf and Harry Martinson, but also, in translation, other writers relatively unknown in English: Georg Trakl, Pablo Neruda and Csar Vallejo. His translations of Transtrmer continued throughout both their careers, and the affinity between their poetry makes these some of the most effective ever done.

On his return to America, Bly started a magazine to publish such writers. The Fifties, co-edited with William Duffy, would change its name decade by decade, and had an immense effect on American poetry, defining the deep image style. Through the magazine, Bly became close to a similarly inclined poet, James Wright, and with him translated Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl (1961). He also translated Knut Hamsuns novel Hunger from the Norwegian in 1967.

Deep image arose from the way the poets Bly admired drew on almost subconscious imagery, yet used it in a very deliberate way. He called it leaping poetry, once describing it as surrealism with a centre holding it all together. Out of these influences, in 1962, came Blys first book of poems, Silence in the Snowy Fields, whose bonding with the countryside would be echoed by later generations of creative writing professors in poems about chopping wood in denim shirts. But in Blys hands, the quiet of the northern landscape provided a deep, personal beauty. It was an immediate success, and led to a Guggenheim fellowship.

Those poems gave no hint of the despair that became evident in The Light Around the Body, which not only reflected his feelings about the Vietnam war, but also his years of struggle in New York. They drew on the same imagery as his first book, but used it in a far more ferocious way. Studying Jungs theories of mythic archetypes led to Blys mixing them into his politics in Sleepers Joining Hands (1973), whose long poem, The Teeth Mother Naked at Last is a powerful condemnation of war as an affront to the Great Mother Culture. He placed a long essay, I Came Out of the Mother Naked at the centre of this book, and prose poems would soon become an integral part of his poetics, culminating in This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopher Wood (1977).

After a divorce from Carol in 1979, in 1980 he married Ruth Ray, a Jungian psychologist, and moved to Moose Lake, Minnesota. He began working with mens and womens groups, producing books of poetry that reflected the transactional experience, most notably the love poems in Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985).

After PBS Televisions Bill Moyers produced a documentary, A Gathering of Men, about those mens groups, Iron John became an immediate bestseller. It was followed by The Sibling Society (1996), which lamented the perpetual adolescence of modern American men, and The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine (with Marion Woodman, 1998). At the same time his translations expanded to include the 15th-century Sufi mystic Kabir and the Urdu poet Ghalib. Bly encapsulated his poetic career in the moving Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (1994) and Morning Poems (1997), and published his second selected poems collection, Eating the Honey of Words, in 1999. The US invasion of Iraq inspired the collection The Insanity of Empire (2004).

In 2013 Airmail, selections from Blys decades of correspondence with Transtrmer, was published in English. It revealed both a deep friendship and a contrast in the way the poetry of this homespun American mystic and the Swedish psychologist made its leaps. Stealing Sugar From the Castle: Selected and New Poems was published in the same year, and a last Collected Poems appeared in 2018.

Bly is survived by Ruth, by four children, Mary, Bridget, Micah and Noah, from his first marriage, and by nine grandchildren.

Robert Elwood Bly, poet and writer, born 23 December 1926; died 21 November 2021

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Robert Bly obituary - The Guardian