Robert Bly obituary | poetry
By Vanessa Goodnight Last updated Nov 27, 2021
In 1986 the New York Times review of Robert Bly's Selected Poems was entitled "Minnesota Transcendentalist." It was empathetic to note his connection with 19th century New England poets, which was strong, but within a few years it would be absolutely prescient. For although one of the preeminent poets of his generation, Bly, who died at the age of 94, is remembered as the two most enduring of the original transcendentalists for other facets of his work than poetry.
Just as Ralph Waldo is Emerson's legacy as an essayist, the influence of Bly's essays on poetic theory and its many translations has resonated with readers and his fellow poets. But Bly is seen more as a 20th century parallel to Henry David Thoreau. Like Thoreau, he made a name for himself with civil disobedience and later with an extremely popular prose work on the denaturing effects of civilization.
Bly's early poetry in the 1960s was his best, though its quality has often been underestimated by controversy over his antiwar positions. In 1966 he co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War. When he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body the following year, he donated the prize money to the Resistance to Conscription. But his entire poetic career was dwarfed by the notable success of Iron John: A Book About Men (1990).
His entire poetic career was driven by the notable success of Iron John: A Book About Men. dwarfed
Meditating on his vision that American masculinity will be ripped from its natural roots because fathers fail to properly initiate their sons into masculinity, Iron John has spawned a movement that combines encounter group sensitivity with primal, tree-hugging survival. Yet with his fantastic, often spiritual, poetry, deep interest in mysticism, rustic clothing, and nasal, high-pitched voice, Bly often seemed an unlikely prophet of masculinity.
Bly called his poetic technique "deep image" and his very visual, quietly surreal poems, often in rural surroundings, reflected his upbringing in Scandinavian-populated 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 joined the US Navy.
Discharged in 1946, he enrolled at St. Olaf's College in Northfield, Minnesota, but after a year moved to Harvard, where he joined a precocious group of writers including John Ashbery, Richard Wilbur, John Hawkes, George Plimpton and in Radcliffe, Adrienne Rich. At Harvard, he read a poem by WB Yeats and decided "to be a poet for the rest of my life".
After graduating in 1950, he moved to New York, writing, and struggling for a living with a series of utility jobs and meager disability payments for the rheumatic fever he caught in the Navy.
In 1954, he returned to the Midwest as a graduate student on the University of Iowa Writing Program, teaching to make a living. Again he found himself in a writer's hothouse; his fellow students were Philip Levine, Donald Justice and WD Snodgrass, with Robert Lowell and John Berryman on the faculty. The proliferation of creative writing programs in American universities today owes much to the collective success of this group, the level of which, it could be argued, has never been replicated.
In 1955 he married the writer Carol McLean and returned to Minnesota. The next year he received a Fulbright scholarship to travel to Norway to translate poetry. There he discovered not only Swedish poets such as Tomas Tranströmer, Gunnar Ekelöf and Harry Martinson, but also other relatively unknown writers in English: Georg Trakl, Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo. His translations of Tranströmer continued throughout their two careers, and the affinity between their poems makes these some of the most effective ever made.
Upon his return to America, Bly started a magazine to publish such authors. The Fifties, co-edited with William Duffy, changed their name decade after decade and had an immense impact on American poetry by defining the style of deep image. Through the magazine, Bly came close to a similarly inclined poet, James Wright, and translated with him Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl (1961). In 1967 he also translated Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger from Norwegian.
A deep image arose from the way the poets Bly admired used almost unconscious images but very consciously used them. He called it "jumping" poetry and once described it as surrealism with a center that holds everything together. These influences resulted in Bly's first volume of poetry, Silence in the Snowy Fields, in 1962, whose connection with the landscape was to be repeated by later generations of professors of creative writing in poems about chopping wood in denim shirts. But in Bly's hands the stillness of the northern landscape gave a deep, personal beauty. It was an instant success and resulted in a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Bly resorted to almost unconscious images, but used them in a very conscious way
These poems gave no hint of the desperation evident in The Light Around the Body, which reflected not only his feelings about the Vietnam War, but also his years of fighting in New York. They drew on the same imagery as his first book, but used it in far wilder ways. Studying Jung's theories about mythical archetypes led Bly to meddle them in his politics in Sleepers Joining Hands (1973), whose long poem The Teeth Mother Naked at Last is a haunted 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 center of that book, and prose poetry soon became an integral part of his poetics, culminating in This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopher Wood (1977).
After divorcing Carol in 1979, he married Ruth Ray, a Jungian psychologist, in 1980 and moved to Moose Lake, Minnesota. He began working with groups of men and women and produced volumes of poetry that reflected the transactional experience, most notably the love poems in Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985).
After PBS Television's Bill Moyers produced the documentary A Gathering of Men about these groups of men, Iron John became an instant best-seller. This was followed by The Sibling Society (1996), which lamented the "eternal 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 were expanded to include the 15th century Sufi mystic Kabir and the Urdu poet Ghalib. Bly summarized his poetic career in the moving meditations on the Insatiable Soul (1994) and Morning Poems (1997) and published his second collection of selected poems, Eating the Honey of Words, in 1999. The US invasion of Iraq inspired The Madness of the Empire (2004) collection.
In 2013, Airmail, a selection from Bly's decades of correspondence with Tranströmer, was published in English. It revealed both a deep friendship and a contrast in the way the poetry of this confident American mystic and the Swedish psychologist made its "leap". Stealing Sugar From the Castle: Selected and New Poems was released that same year, and a final Collected Poems was released in 2018.
Bly leaves behind Ruth, four children, Mary, Bridget, Micah and Noah, from his first marriage and nine grandchildren.
Robert Elwood Bly, poet and writer, born December 23, 1926; died November 21, 2021
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