Best-selling author, poet Robert Bly dies at 94

Nov. 22 (UPI) -- American poet Robert Bly, a towering literary figure whose work earned him accolades including a National Book Award but whose theories on masculinity drew criticism, died Sunday in Minneapolis, his family said. He was 94.

Bly, a best-selling author, antiwar activist and translator who introduced international poets to American audiences, died at home with most of his family by his side, his daughter, Mary Bly, told the Star Tribune newspaper.

"We played Chopin all the day before, and literally all his children were around him. And when he took his final breath it was with a choral hallelujah," she said.

A Minnesota native of striking appearance at well over 6 feet and usually sporting a head of thick, unkempt hair, Bly was long considered one of the nation's leading advocates for poetry and is credited with shaking up a largely complacent scene beginning in 1962 with his first major collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields, which he authored with his first wife, the writer Carol Bly.

Six years later he won a National Book Award for his collection The Light Around the Body. By then he had emerged as a prominent critic of the Vietnam War, reflected in such angry poems as "Counting Small-Boned Bodies" and "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last."

During this period, Bly drew big crowds to his poetry readings, which he staged with theatrical flair with masks and backgrounds of drums and sitars. They would include hours-long recitations, frequently from memory.

In the 1990s, he achieved another level of fame -- but also controversy -- with the publication of Iron John: A Book About Men, which became an international best-seller. Prompted by the death of his father, Bly in the book employs a mythological framework to offer "a new vision of what it means to be a man."

It attracted a potent following among those who agreed with its thesis that modern civilization had disassociated men from their feelings and was a key work of the era's "mythopoetic men's movement," which was characterized by drum circles, self-help activities and therapeutic workshops.

Iron John, however, drew significant backlash from feminists, who contended the book and men's movement it helped inspire did little to address the issues of masculine violence aimed at women and hostility to homosexuality.