Robert Bly: The Poet and his Critics

Robert Bly has become one of the moving and motivating forces in contemporary culture, both in America and abroad. He has been active as poet, literary critic, translator, political activist, and media guru. His translations have been instrumental in introducing the work of Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Federico Garcia Lorca, Cunnar Ekelof, Kabir, Juan Ramon Jimemez, Antonio Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke and others to an English-speaking audience. Robert Bly: The Poet and His Critics is the first detailed analytical analysis of the extensive critical commentary devoted to Bly, and also the first book to account for Bly’s best-selling men’s group book, Iron John: A Book About Men (1990). It offers a systematic chronological treatment of the reception of Bly’s work during the past thirty years, and analyses the various critical methodologies that critics have applied to Bly’s work during the course of his long and varied career.