He won the National Book Award in 1968.

While every obit is going to mention the men's movement, none, so far, has mentioned men's rights activists and how they see him today.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/books/robert-bly-dead.html

By Robert D. McFadden
Nov. 22, 2021
Updated 4:00 p.m. ET
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 best seller that called for a restoration of primal male audacity, died on Sunday at his home in Minneapolis. He was 94.

The death was confirmed by his wife, Ruth Bly.

From the sheer volume of his output — 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 — one might imagine a recluse holed up in a North Woods cabin. And Mr. Bly did live for many years in a small town in Minnesota, immersing himself in the poetry of silent fields and snowy woodlands.

But from relative obscurity he roared into national consciousness in the 1960s, with antiwar free verse that attacked President Lyndon B. Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the commander in Vietnam. His pen also took on the American war machine:

Massive engines lift beautifully from the deck,
Wings appear over the trees, wings with eight hundred rivets,
Engines burning a thousand gallons of gasoline a minute sweep over the huts with dirt floors.

In 1966, Mr. 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.

Taking another abrupt turn in 1990, he published what was to become his most famous work, “Iron John: A Book About Men,” which drew on myths, legends, poetry and science of a sort to make the case that American men had grown soft and feminized and needed to rediscover their primitive virtues of ferocity and audacity and thus regain the self-confidence to be nurturing fathers and mentors.

The book touched a nerve. It was on The New York Times’s best-seller list for 62 weeks, including 10 weeks as No. 1, and was translated into many languages.

Mr. Bly was profiled in newspapers, magazines and a 90-minute PBS special by Bill Moyers, who called him “the most influential poet writing today.”...

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On Monday, November 22, 2021 at 4:50:02 PM UTC-5, Lenona wrote:
> He won the National Book Award in 1968.

What We Have Inherited From the Intellectual Leadership of New England

Robert Bly
I

The shrouded figure struggling to break from the coffin;
The sea giving out muffled cries by night;
The black hose damning the wild river.

II

I saw a vision of Cotton Mather, leading
The Puritans into the gate of hell,
Lighting the way with a pine bough giving off darkness,
And a black hen was walking on his chest.

III

The thorns of the woods of Massachusetts,
The black horse in Cotton Mather’s dreams,
The cloud walking over the face of the sea,
And the mad form swinging in the branches,
The comb filled with blood; horses rearing at night.