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Z Robert Bly (b. 1926) LINKShttp://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bly/bly.htm
This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Robert Bly.
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=286
This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Robert Bly including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.
BIOGRAPHY
A native Minnesotan, Robert Bly was brought up on a farm in Madison, Minnesota and later served in the Navy during World War II. He then attended St. Olaf College and graduated from Harvard College in 1950. In college and while living for a time in New York City, Bly composed the poems that would make up his first volume
The Lute of Three Loudnesses. In 1958 he founded the influential and provocative literary magazine
The Fifties that later evolved into
The Sixties,
The Seventies, and so on down to the present. Bly's poetry of the so-called "deep image," which he explored in collaboration with Robert Kelly and James Wright, was influenced by the archetypal psychology of Carl Jung. Another poetic influence has come from translating Spanish and South American surrealist poets such as César Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Antonio Machado, as well as the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer. In explaining his understanding of the poetic symbol, Bly has employed the key word "entangle" from the Irish modernist poet W. B. Yeats: "I'll use Yeats's marvelous word
entangle; he suggested that the symbolist poem entangles some substance from the divine world in its words." Bly's role as a poet has also entangled forms of social and political advocacy as in his founding (with David Ray) of American Writers Against the Vietnam War and his controversial promotion of a male spiritualist movement theorized in his 1990 best-selling book of prose,
Iron John. In addition to numerous translations, volumes of prose, and prose poems, Bly's major books of poetry include
Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962),
The Light Around the Body (1967),
The Morning Glory (1969),
The Teeth Mother Naked at Last (1970),
Sleepers Joining Hands (1973),
Old Man Rubbing His Eyes (1975),
This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (1979),
The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), and
Eating the Honey of Words:
New and Selected Poems (1999). Bly supports himself from his writing, residing in rural Minnesota.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Davis, William Virgil, Ed.
Critical Essays on Robert Bly. New York : G.K. Hall, 1992.
—.
Robert Bly:
The Poet and His Critics. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994.
—.
Understanding Robert Bly. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.
Harris, Victoria Frenkel.
The Incorporative Consciousness of Robert Bly. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.
Seidler, Victor J.
Man Enough:
Embodying Masculinities. Thousand Oaks, Calif. : Sage Publications, 1997.
Sugg, Richard P.
Robert Bly. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.
SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER 
