His most famous, and most controversial, work was “Iron John: A Book About Men,” which made a case that American men had grown soft and feminized.
Robert Bly, the Minnesota poet, author and translator who articulated the solitude of landscapes, galvanized protests against the Vietnam War and started a controversial men’s movement with a best seller that called for a restoration of primal male audacity, died on Sunday at his home in Minneapolis.
From the sheer volume of his output — more than 50 books of poetry, translations of European and Latin American writers, and nonfiction commentaries on literature, gender roles and social ills, as well as poetry magazines he edited for decades — one might imagine a recluse holed up in a North Woods cabin.
But from relative obscurity he roared into national consciousness in the 1960s, with antiwar free verse that attacked President Lyndon B.
In 1966, Mr. Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and toured the country, rallying the opposition with poetry “read-ins” on campuses and in town halls.
Mr. Bly was profiled in newspapers, magazines and a 90-minute PBS special by Bill Moyers, who called him “the most influential poet writing today.” He became a cultural phenomenon, a father figure to millions.
Mr. Bly, a shambling white-haired guru who strummed a bouzouki and wore colorful vests, was easily mocked as Iron John himself, a hairy wild man who, in the German myth, helped aimless princes in their quests.
Undismayed, he continued his workshops for years with a more down-to-earth focus.
And he continued to write rivers of poetry, to edit magazines and to translate works from Swedish, Norwegian, German and Spanish, and to churn out jeremiads.
23, 1926, to Norwegian farmers, Jacob and Alice in 1944, served two years in the Navy and studied for a year at St.
They had four children, Bridget, Mary, Micah and Noah, and were divorced in 1979. In 1980, he married Ruth Ray, a Jungian therapist.
On a fellowship, he lived in Norway in 1956-57. In 1958, he founded a poetry magazine, The Fifties, which survived to become The Sixties, The Seventies and The Eighties.
In the 1970s, he wrote 11 books of poetry, essays and translations, delving into myths, meditations and Indian ecstatic verse.
In 2004, he published “The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the War in Iraq,” and in an introduction noted wryly that little had changed since Vietnam.