Born in 1926 in Western Minnesota, Robert Bly spent two years in the Navy (1944 -1946) before entering St. Olaf College. After just one year at the Minnesota school, he went to Harvard, joining the likes of Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, George Plimpton, John Ashbery, and John Hawkes as writers at the university at that time.

Bly graduated from Harvard in 1950 and moved to New York where he lived the life of a struggling writer without much in the way of funds to support himself. However, beginning in 1954, he moved to Iowa and began a two year stay at the University of Iowa as a part of the school's Writers Workshop. Then in 1956, the man of Norwegian ancestry accepted a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway where he began translating Norwegian poetry to English.

The experience in Norway led Bly to start a literary magazine for poetry in the United States that featured translations of many writers he met while in Norway. "The Fifties" and "The Sixties" and "The Seventies" introduced many new foreign poets to others of his generation.

In 1966, Bly was one of the co-founders of a resistance group known as the American Writers Against the Vietnam War. When he was awarded the National Book Award for "The Light Around the Body," Bly donated his prize to the support of the war resistance.

A prolific writer, Bly published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, many relating to the mystical world during the 1970's alone. He followed that decade by publishing "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" during the 1980's.

Bly is most well-known for his international bestseller, "Iron John: A Book About Men." The book lead to many requests for workshops for men, seminars he often conducted with James Hillman, and to combined workshops for men and women which he did with Marion Woodman.

Bly is considered one of the pre-eminent American poets living today.

Snowbanks North of the House

Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six
feet from the house ...
Thoughts that go so far.
The boy gets out of high school and reads no more
books;
the son stops calling home.
The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no
more bread.
And the wife looks at her husband one night at a
party, and loves him no more.
The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls
leaving the church.
It will not come closer
the one inside moves back, and the hands touch
nothing, and are safe.

The father grieves for his son, and will not leave the
room where the coffin stands
He turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.

And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on
through the unattached heavens alone.

The toe of the shoe pivots
in the dust ...
And the man in the black coat turns, and goes back
down the hill.
No one knows why he came, or why he turned away,
and did not climb the hill.