Robert Elwood Bly (December 23, 1926 – November 21, 2021) was an American poet, essayist, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. His best-known prose book is Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), which spent 62 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, and is a key text of the mythopoetic men's movement. He won the 1968 National Book Award for Poetry for his book The Light Around the Body.
Bly has frequently conducted workshops
for men, together with James Hillman, Michael J. Meade, and others, as well as
workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman. He maintained a friendly correspondence with Clarissa
Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run With the Wolves. [Estes refers to correspondence with Bly in
footnotes to her bestseller, Women Who
Run With the Wolves.] Bly
wrote The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine with
Marion Woodman. He published a poetry anthology titled The Rag and Bone
Shop of the Heart (1992), with James Hillman and Michael Meade
co-editing.
Thought and the Men’s Movement
Much of Bly's prose writing focuses on
what he saw as the particularly troubled situation in which many males find
themselves today. 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. Pre-modern cultures had elaborate myths, often enacted as rites of
passage, as well as "men's societies" where older men would teach
young boys about these gender-specific issues. As modern fathers have become
increasingly absent, this knowledge is no longer being passed down the
generations, resulting in what he referred to as a Sibling Society. 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. Eventually they might become weak or absent fathers themselves
which will cause this behaviour to be passed down to their children. In his
book The Sibling Society (1997), Bly argues that a society formed of
such men is inherently problematic as it lacks creativity and a deep sense of
empathy. The image of half-adults is further reinforced by popular culture
which often portrays fathers as naive, overweight and almost always emotionally
co-dependent. Historically this represents a recent shift from a traditional
patriarchal model and Bly believes that women rushed to fill the gap that was
formed through the various youth movements during the 1960s, enhancing men's
emotional capacities and helping them to connect with women's age-old pain of
repression. It has however also led to the creation of "soft males"
who lacked the outwardly directed strength to revitalize the community with
assertiveness and a certain warrior strength.
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. In contrast to the continual pursuit of
higher achievements, that is constantly taught to young men today, the theme of
spiritual descent (often being referred to by its Greek term κατάβασις)
which is to be found in many of these myths, is presented as a necessary step
for coming in contact with the deeper aspects of the masculine self and
achieving its full potential. This is often presented as hero, often during the
middle of his quest, going underground to pass a period of solitude and sorrow
in semi-bestial mode. 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. As a consequence, the Witch's symbols are essentially inverted motherly
symbols, where the loving act of cooking is transformed into the brewing of
evil potions and knitting clothes takes the form of spider's web. The feeding
process is also reversed, with the child now in danger of being eaten to feed
the body of the Witch rather than being fed by the mother's own body. 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. Fairy tales according to this interpretation mostly describe
internal battles played out externally, where the hero saves his future bride
by killing a witch, as in "The Drummer" (Grimm’s tale 193). This
particular concept is expanded in Bly's 1989 talk "The Human Shadow"
and the book it presented.
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