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
Male initiation does not move toward machoism; on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.
What does it mean when a man falls in love with a radiant face across the room? It may mean that he has some soul work to do. His soul is the issue. Instead of pursuing the woman and trying to get her alone, away from her husband, he needs to go alone himself, perhaps to a mountain cabin, for three months, write poetry, canoe down a river, and dream. That would save some women a lot of trouble.
I want nothing from You but to see You.
I have risen to a body not yet born, existing like a light around a body through which the body moves like a sliding moon.
Two birds fly past. They are needed somewhere.
We spend our life until we’re twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.
One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.
The best presenters have conversations with their audiences.
As the saying goes, you might as well be yourself; everyone else is taken.
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.
The world belongs primarily to the dead, and we only rent it from them for a little while. They created it, they wrote its literature and its songs, and they are deeply invested in how children are treated, because the children are the ones who will keep it going. The idea that each of us has the right to change everything is a deep insult to them.
If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth: Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.
There are years from my childhood that I cannot remember and I cannot forget.
I have spent many years trying to recover a common language, one that can cross the distance between people.