Robert Bly, the Minnesota poet, author and translator "who articulated the solitude of landscapes, galvanized protests against the Vietnam War and started a controversial men's movement with a bestseller that called for a restoration of primal male audacity," died November 21 at age 94, the New York Times reported. Bly's work included more than 50 books of poetry, translations of European and Latin American writers, and nonfiction commentaries on literature, gender roles and social ills, as well as poetry magazines he edited for decades. In 1966, Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and toured the country, rallying the opposition with poetry "read-ins" on campuses and in town halls. He won the National Book Award for poetry for The Light Around the Body (1967) and donated his $1,000 prize to the draft resistance.
During the 1970s, he wrote 11 books of poetry, essays and translations. In the '80s and '90s, he produced 27 books, including The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985) and Selected Poems (1986). Iron John: A Book About Men (1990) was on the Times's bestseller list for 62 weeks, including 10 weeks at number one. In 2004, he published The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the War in Iraq. His most recent book was Robert Bly: Collected Poems (2018), available from W.W. Norton ($39.95).