Poet Robert Bly, a tireless advocate for his art form, who over the course of half a century transformed American poetry and was also central to the controversial men’s movement, died Sunday.
Bly argued in his 1990 book, Iron John: A Book About Men, that society causes men to be disconnected from their feelings, and he knew he could rub people the wrong way.
He was a brash farm boy from southern Minnesota who served in the Navy, then went to Harvard with the likes of poet Donald Hall and author George Plimpton.
In the first issue, they laid out their credo: “The editors of this magazine think that most of the poetry published in America today is too old-fashioned.” The Fifties became a must-read publication for U.S.
Bly said they got submissions from some of the best known poets of the time, but rejected almost all of them.
The magazine did print poems by Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg and James Wright, as well as Bly’s translations of poets largely unknown to U.S.
He said at the time that Bly “really changed the way poetry is read and heard in America.
Bly was particularly interested in the deeper meanings of fairy tales and the roots of gender roles in modern society.
The book, focused on helping men be more sensitive, spent 62 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list and became a focus of the nascent men’s movement.