Minnesota Author Biographies Project: Robert Bly

Robert Bly

Biographical Notes

Date of birth: December 23, 1926, Madison, Minnesota

Robert Elwood Bly. Poet, author, and editor. Attended St. Olaf College, 1946-47; B.A., Harvard University, 1950; M.A., University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, 1956. Studied in Norway on a Fulbright grant, 1956-57; Amy Lowell fellow, 1964-65; Guggenheim fellow, 1965-66, 1972-73; and Rockefeller Foundation fellow, 1967. Wrote several books of poetry, including The Light around the Body (1967), which received the National Book Award in poetry for 1968, and This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (1979). Edited A Poetry Reading against the Vietnam War (1966), and News from the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness (1980). Translated and published numerous works by Swedish, Norwegian, German, and Spanish poets. Helped organize Minnesota Writers' Publishing House, 1970, a cooperative that published works by Minnesota poets from 1973 on. Editor, publisher, and founder, Fifties (later Sixties and Seventies) magazine, a poetry journal published by Seventies Press, Odin House, starting in 1958. Married twice: Carolyn McLean, 1955, who was also an author, and Ruth Ray, 1980.

Selected Works

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Additional Resources

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Growing up in Minnesota: Ten Writers Remember Their Childhoods edited by Chester G. Anderson
Northern Lights Episode #64
A Poetry Reading against the Vietnam War collection gathered by Robert Bly and David Ray
Robert Bly: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography by William H. Roberson
American Authors Since 1945
Links to Bly poems reproduced on the web
Bly Book Review
Review of Bly's book Sibling Society
Leaping Into the Unknown
Essay on Bly and modernism in poetry
Robert Bly Colloquium
Links to a variety of articles on Bly's writings
Writer Robert Bly Laments about Values
Bly interview with the Detroit News discussing book Sibling Society

Sources used to prepare this author entry

The following bibliography may include links to Web sites that are no longer operable or have changed location. The sources are shown as they existed in the fall of 1999 when the entries were compiled.

Anderson, Chester. Growing up in Minnesota: Ten Writers RememberTheir Childhoods. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976.
Bly, Robert E. This Tree Will be here for a Thousand Years. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.
Contemporary Authors. Vol. 5-6. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1963.
Minneapolis/St. Paul, Aug. 1981, p. 76.
Olsen, Donald D. "The Sixties Press." Masters' Thesis, University of Minnesota, 1964.
Publishers Weekly. 9 May 1980, Vol. 217, no. 18 p. 10. New York: R. R. Bowker Co., 1980.
South Dakota Review, Spring 1967, Vol. 5, no. 1, p. 3-19. Vermillion, S.D.: University of South Dakota.
Who's Who in America: 1980-81. Chicago: Marquis Who's Who, 1980.
Who's Who in America: 1992-93. Chicago: Marquis Who's Who, 1992.
Who's Who in the Midwest, 1970-71. Chicago: Marquis Who's Who Inc., 1970.

This pilot database compiled and maintained by the Minnesota Historical Society.