Robert Elwood Bly (December 23, 1926 – November 21, 2021) was an American poet, essayist, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement.

These included both Norwegians and writers from Spain, Latin America and elsewhere, among them Gunnar Ekelof, Harry Martinson, Georg Trakl, Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Rumi, Hafez, Kabir, and Mirabai.

Bly believed this approach was instigated by the Modernists and formed the aesthetic of most post-World War II American poetry.

He criticized the influence of American-born Modernists such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams, and argued that American poetry needed to model itself on the more inward-looking work of European and South American poets like Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

[12] In his speech accepting the 1968 National Book Award for The Light Around the Body,[3] he announced that he would be contributing the $1000 prize to draft resistance organizations.

Bly's 1970 poem "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last", later collected in his book Sleepers Joining Hands (1973), is a major contribution to anti-war poetry of the Vietnam War era.

During the 1980s he published Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The Wingéd Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow.

He published a poetry anthology titled The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart (1992), with James Hillman and Michael Meade co-editing.

The poets he chooses in the book as examples of this leaping poetry included Federico García Lorca, Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke and Tomas Tranströmer.

In 1981, Yellow Moon Press published Night and Sleep, which contained translations of Rumi by Coleman Barks and Robert Bly.

In 2008, The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door gave us thirty poems by Hafez translated by Bly and noted Islamic scholar Leonard Lewisohn.

He understood this to be a result of, among other things, the decline of traditional fathering which left young boys unguided through the stages of life leading to maturity.

He claimed that in contrast with women who are better informed by their bodies (notably by the beginning and end of their menstrual cycle), men need to be actively guided out of boyhood and into manhood by their elders.

[21] The "Absence of the Father" is a recurrent theme in Bly's work and according to him, many of the phenomena of depression, juvenile delinquency and lack of leadership in business and politics are linked to it.

Bly therefore saw today's men as half-adults, trapped between boyhood and maturity, in a state where they find it hard to become responsible in their work as well as leaders in their communities.

In Bly's view, a potential solution lay in the rediscovery of the meanings hidden in traditional myths and fairytales as well as works of poetry.

He researched and collected myths that concern male maturity, often originating from the Grimms' Fairy Tales and published them in various books, Iron John being the best known example.

Bly noticed that a cultural space existed in most traditional societies for such a period in a man's life, in the absence of which, many men today go into a depression and alcoholism as they subconsciously try to emulate this innate ritual.

Bly was influenced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who developed the theory of archetypes, the discrete structures of the Psyche which emerge as images in dreams, myths, and art.

The Powerful King, the Evil Witch and the Beautiful Maiden are, according to Jung, some of the imprints of the collective unconscious and Bly wrote extensively about their meaning and relations to modern life.

As an example and in accordance with Jung, he considered the Witch to be that part of the male psyche upon which the negative and destructive side of a woman is imprinted and which first developed during infancy to store the imperfections of one's own mother.

In that respect, the Witch is a mark of arrested development on the part of the man as it guards against feminine realities that his psyche is not yet able to incorporate fully.

In conclusion, Gioia wrote, "Bly insists on being judged as a major poet, but his verse cannot bear the weight of that demand.