Bly, Robert Elwood (1926– )

US writer. His book Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), in which he argued that men needed to rediscover the warrior side of their natures, started the ‘men's movement’. His collection Light Around the Body (1967) won the National Book Award for poetry.

Bly championed new American poetry through his literary magazine the Fifties, publishing his first collection of poetry, Silence in the Snowy Fields, in 1962. He helped to organize American Writers Against the Vietnam War in 1966, denouncing the war in his own poetry. Other collections include The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981) and The Spirit Boy and Insatiable Soul (1994). He translated the poems of Pablo Neruda from Spanish and the novel Hunger by Knut Hamsun from Norwegian. Becoming interested in matriarchal religions, Bly conducted seminars on the Great Mother, a pre-Christian deity, in the 1960s and 1970s. In Iron John he argued that men had moved away from the traditional male values as a result of the feminist movement, and needed to distance themselves from their mothers and learn from older men. This was seen as a backlash against the feminist movement.