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 …
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. He was 94 years old. Bly’s death was confirmed on Monday by his friend, neighbor and fellow poet, James Lenfestey. The cause of death was not immediately known. Bly, who lived in Minneapolis, had been out of the public eye for close to a decade before his death. 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. “I do remember people wanting to kill me, but that’s not unusual,” he said in 2010. 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. After graduating in 1950, he tired of East Coast life and moved back West. He got an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and then returned to farm life in the town of Madison, Minn. In 1958, Bly launched a literary magazine called The Fifties with his friend William Duffy. 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.
