Robert Bly
Robert Bly
Robert Blyis an American poet, author, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. His most commercially successful book to date was Iron John: A Book About Men, a key text of the mythopoetic men's movement, which spent 62 weeks on the The New York Times Best Seller list. He won the 1968 National Book Award for Poetry for his book The Light Around the Body...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth23 December 1926
CityLac Qui Parle County, MN
CountryUnited States of America
I know a lot of men who are healthier at age fifty than they have ever been before, because a lot of their fear is gone
Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.
In ordinary life, a mentor can guide a young man through various disciplines, helping to bring him out of boyhood into manhood; and that in turn is associated not with body building, but with building and emotional body capable of containing more than one sort of ecstasy.
One man wrote me, saying, 'You know who you are? You're nothing but a Captain Bly pissing up a drainpipe!'
Every breath taken in by the man Who loves, and the woman who loves, Goes to fill the water tank Where the spirit horses drink.
A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
And why shouldn't the miraculous, / Caught on this earth, visit / The old man alone in his hut?
One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture; that is why suburban children want rap music.
By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life.
If a man, cautious, hides his limp, Somebody has to limp it! Things do it; the surroundings limp. House walls get scars, the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.
Every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.
Tragedies are about the depths that call up to certain men and insist that they descend.
We are living at an important and fruitful moment now, for it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn out; a man can no longer depend on them. By the time a man is thirty-five he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life.
Grief is the doorway to a man's feelings.