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Collected Poems
Gathering more than sixty years of poetry, Collected Poems showcases the brilliant career of a "great American transcendentalist" ( New York Times ). An extraordinary culmination for Robert Bly’s lifelong intellectual adventure, Collected Poems presents the full magnitude of his body of work for the first time. Bly has long been the voice of transcendentalism and meditative mysticism for his generation; every stage of his work is warmed by his devotion to the art of poetry and his affection for the varied worlds that inspire him. Influenced by Emerson and Thoreau alongside spiritual traditions from Sufism to Gnosticism, he is a poet moved by mysteries, speaking the language of images. Collected Poems gathers the fourteen volumes of his impressive oeuvre into one place, including his imagistic debut, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962); the clear-eyed truth-telling of his National Book Award–winning collection, The Light Around the Body (1967); the masterful prose poems of The Morning Glory (1975); and the fiercely introspective, uniquely American ghazals of his latest collection, Talking into the Ear of a Donkey (2011). A monumental poetic achievement, Collected Poems makes clear why poets and lovers of poetry have long looked to Robert Bly for emotional authenticity, moral authority, and artistic inspiration.
- GenresPoetry
576 pages, Hardcover
Published December 18, 2018
About the author
Robert Bly
283 books433 followersRobert Bly was an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.
Robert Bly was born in western Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian stock. He enlisted in the Navy in 1944 and spent two years there. After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard and thereby joined the famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, which included Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Harold Brodky, George Plimpton, and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York living, as they say, hand to mouth.
Beginning in 1954, he took two years at the University of Iowa at the Writers Workshop along with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and others. In 1956 he received a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. While there he found not only his relatives but the work of a number of major poets whose force was not present in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl and Harry Martinson. He determined then to start a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States and so begin The Fifties and The Sixties and The Seventies, which introduced many of these poets to the writers of his generation, and published as well essays on American poets and insults to those deserving. During this time he lived on a farm in Minnesota with his wife and children.
In 1966 he co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and led much of the opposition among writers to that war. When he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the Resistance. During the 70s he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 80s he published Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The Wingéd Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau,The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow.
His work Iron John: A Book About Men is an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages. He frequently does workshops for men with James Hillman and others, and workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman. He and his wife Ruth, along with the storyteller Gioia Timpanelli, frequently conduct seminars on European fairy tales. In the early 90s, with James Hillman and Michael Meade, he edited The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, an anthology of poems from the men's work. Since then he has edited The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford, and The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy, a collection of sacred poetry from many cultures.
Robert Bly was born in western Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian stock. He enlisted in the Navy in 1944 and spent two years there. After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard and thereby joined the famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, which included Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Harold Brodky, George Plimpton, and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York living, as they say, hand to mouth.
Beginning in 1954, he took two years at the University of Iowa at the Writers Workshop along with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and others. In 1956 he received a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. While there he found not only his relatives but the work of a number of major poets whose force was not present in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl and Harry Martinson. He determined then to start a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States and so begin The Fifties and The Sixties and The Seventies, which introduced many of these poets to the writers of his generation, and published as well essays on American poets and insults to those deserving. During this time he lived on a farm in Minnesota with his wife and children.
In 1966 he co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and led much of the opposition among writers to that war. When he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the Resistance. During the 70s he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 80s he published Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The Wingéd Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau,The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow.
His work Iron John: A Book About Men is an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages. He frequently does workshops for men with James Hillman and others, and workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman. He and his wife Ruth, along with the storyteller Gioia Timpanelli, frequently conduct seminars on European fairy tales. In the early 90s, with James Hillman and Michael Meade, he edited The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, an anthology of poems from the men's work. Since then he has edited The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford, and The Soul Is Here for Its Own Joy, a collection of sacred poetry from many cultures.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
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March 28, 20268/10
There’s something almost stubbornly unfashionable about Robert Bly—and that, I think, is exactly his strength. The poems in this collection don’t perform for us; instead, they lean back, cross their arms, and wait to see if we’re willing to follow. When they work, they feel less like poems and more like unearthly transmissions: quiet, strange, half-lit messages that arrive from somewhere older than language.
You feel it most in those moments when a poem suddenly deepens beneath your feet—when something simple and almost plainspoken opens into something heavier, more difficult, more true. Bly has a way of letting an image sit just long enough that it begins to shift, and before you quite realize it, you’re no longer looking at the surface of things but at what lies underneath. He doesn’t explain the feeling; he allows the world itself to carry it.
But it’s an uneven gathering. For each poem that startles you into stillness, there’s another that feels almost willfully opaque. Bly can drift into a kind of private symbolism that resists not just easy reading, but any reading at all. And yet—even there—you sense the intention is not obscurity for its own sake, but a refusal to tidy the world into something explainable.
Read too much of it at once (and I did) and you begin to feel it. It's not boredom, exactly, but a kind of fullness. The same tonal register, the same descent into the interior, the same insistence on depth. It reminded me very much of my earlier overindulgence with Pablo Neruda’s All the Odes—too much richness taken too quickly, until the palate gives way.
And yet, what lingers for me, is his insistence that poetry must turn us outward—toward nature, toward grief, toward something shared and older than ourselves. This is where his work feels most alive, and most persuasive. He is at his best when the personal loosens its grip and becomes something larger, something almost ancestral.
In these works, Bly was doing something few poets even attempted. He was speaking from the interior life without softening it, without making it palatable, without translating it into something easily consumed. He trusted the weight of what he had found. And when he succeeded, the effect was not decorative; it was transformative, in small, quiet, undeniable ways.
I didn’t connect with every poem equally—but I never lost sight of what he was reaching for, or the quiet integrity with which he pursued it.
Bly is not always easy—but when he reaches you, he stays.
One of my favourites, from his early years:
Thinking of "The Autumn Fields"
Already autumn begins here in the mossy rocks.
The sheep bells moving from the wind are sad.
I have left my wife foolishly in a flat country,
I have set up my table looking over a valley.
There are fish in the lake but I will not fish;
I will sit silently at my table by the window.
From whatever appears on my plate,
I will give a little to the birds and the grass.
How easy to see the road the liferiver takes!
Hard to move one living thing from its own path.
The fish adores being in the deep water;
The bird easily finds a tree to live in.
In the second half of life man accepts poverty and illness;
praise and blame belong to the glory of the first half.
Although cold wind blows against my walking stick,
I will never get tired of the ferns on this mountain.
Music and chanting help me overcome my faults;
the mountains and woods keep my body fiery.
I have two or three books only in my room.
The sun shining off the empty bookcase warms my back.
Going out I pick up the pinecones the wind has thrown away.
When night comes, I will open a honeycomb.
On the floor-throw covered with tiny red and blue flowers
I bring my stocking feet closer to the faint incense.
I will never get tired of the ferns on this mountain.
There’s something almost stubbornly unfashionable about Robert Bly—and that, I think, is exactly his strength. The poems in this collection don’t perform for us; instead, they lean back, cross their arms, and wait to see if we’re willing to follow. When they work, they feel less like poems and more like unearthly transmissions: quiet, strange, half-lit messages that arrive from somewhere older than language.
You feel it most in those moments when a poem suddenly deepens beneath your feet—when something simple and almost plainspoken opens into something heavier, more difficult, more true. Bly has a way of letting an image sit just long enough that it begins to shift, and before you quite realize it, you’re no longer looking at the surface of things but at what lies underneath. He doesn’t explain the feeling; he allows the world itself to carry it.
But it’s an uneven gathering. For each poem that startles you into stillness, there’s another that feels almost willfully opaque. Bly can drift into a kind of private symbolism that resists not just easy reading, but any reading at all. And yet—even there—you sense the intention is not obscurity for its own sake, but a refusal to tidy the world into something explainable.
Read too much of it at once (and I did) and you begin to feel it. It's not boredom, exactly, but a kind of fullness. The same tonal register, the same descent into the interior, the same insistence on depth. It reminded me very much of my earlier overindulgence with Pablo Neruda’s All the Odes—too much richness taken too quickly, until the palate gives way.
And yet, what lingers for me, is his insistence that poetry must turn us outward—toward nature, toward grief, toward something shared and older than ourselves. This is where his work feels most alive, and most persuasive. He is at his best when the personal loosens its grip and becomes something larger, something almost ancestral.
In these works, Bly was doing something few poets even attempted. He was speaking from the interior life without softening it, without making it palatable, without translating it into something easily consumed. He trusted the weight of what he had found. And when he succeeded, the effect was not decorative; it was transformative, in small, quiet, undeniable ways.
I didn’t connect with every poem equally—but I never lost sight of what he was reaching for, or the quiet integrity with which he pursued it.
Bly is not always easy—but when he reaches you, he stays.
One of my favourites, from his early years:
Thinking of "The Autumn Fields"
Already autumn begins here in the mossy rocks.
The sheep bells moving from the wind are sad.
I have left my wife foolishly in a flat country,
I have set up my table looking over a valley.
There are fish in the lake but I will not fish;
I will sit silently at my table by the window.
From whatever appears on my plate,
I will give a little to the birds and the grass.
How easy to see the road the liferiver takes!
Hard to move one living thing from its own path.
The fish adores being in the deep water;
The bird easily finds a tree to live in.
In the second half of life man accepts poverty and illness;
praise and blame belong to the glory of the first half.
Although cold wind blows against my walking stick,
I will never get tired of the ferns on this mountain.
Music and chanting help me overcome my faults;
the mountains and woods keep my body fiery.
I have two or three books only in my room.
The sun shining off the empty bookcase warms my back.
Going out I pick up the pinecones the wind has thrown away.
When night comes, I will open a honeycomb.
On the floor-throw covered with tiny red and blue flowers
I bring my stocking feet closer to the faint incense.
I will never get tired of the ferns on this mountain.
February 26, 2019
Over 500 pages of first rate poetry. You can't go wrong by reading this.
July 22, 2023
I came to Bly through his translations/collaborations with the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, which I enjoyed immensely. Perhaps because of this, my expectations were somewhat disappointed in that the imagistic, mystical tone I loved so much in Tranströmer was not so much present here, except among the early poems of Silence in the Snowy Fields:
There is unknown dust that is near us,
Waves breaking on shores just over the hill,
Trees full of birds that we have never seen,
Nets drawn down with dark fish.
The evening arrives; we look up, and it is there,
It has come through the nets of the stars,
Through the tissues of the grass,
Walking quietly over the asylums of the waters.
'Surprised by Evening'
Sadly, I didn't really warm to the more discursive prose poems that form the majority of the Collected Poems. Among the later poems though there were one or two, such as Bly's uniquely North American take on the ghazal, 'What the Old Poets Failed to Say' that were worthy of attention:
The sunlight on wheat-heads in August holds me firmly,
For I am in love with the wheat soon to be cut.
Let's thank whoever it was who kept sorrow alive...
Tell me why my titles are often so sad,
And why cattle keep on going every day
To the slaughterhouse, and why wars go on so long.
Night after night goes by in the old man's head.
We try to ask new questions. But whatever
The old poets failed to say will never be said
There is unknown dust that is near us,
Waves breaking on shores just over the hill,
Trees full of birds that we have never seen,
Nets drawn down with dark fish.
The evening arrives; we look up, and it is there,
It has come through the nets of the stars,
Through the tissues of the grass,
Walking quietly over the asylums of the waters.
'Surprised by Evening'
Sadly, I didn't really warm to the more discursive prose poems that form the majority of the Collected Poems. Among the later poems though there were one or two, such as Bly's uniquely North American take on the ghazal, 'What the Old Poets Failed to Say' that were worthy of attention:
The sunlight on wheat-heads in August holds me firmly,
For I am in love with the wheat soon to be cut.
Let's thank whoever it was who kept sorrow alive...
Tell me why my titles are often so sad,
And why cattle keep on going every day
To the slaughterhouse, and why wars go on so long.
Night after night goes by in the old man's head.
We try to ask new questions. But whatever
The old poets failed to say will never be said
March 30, 2021
One of my goals this year was to read more poetry. I wasn't sure what that would be like, as in the past I'd read 1 or 2 poems at a time. I do like reading poetry that way. It often gives me inspiration to write myself. I am learning a new way to read poetry with books like this. It was fascinating to read all of a prolific poet's published poems. It felt a bit like a mystery as I wanted to see what would happen next. Nature? Love? Writing? Humor? War? I hilighted many poems in this collection and shared them with friends. I am looking forward to returning to this collection in the future for a more thorough read. I also know that my understanding of things changes as time goes by. I'm always curious about a poet's writing process and all the work that was not published. A wonderful journey to go on with Mr. Bly. I am thankful.
August 13, 2019
Fierce spirit. Great poet. More Old Testament than New. I had expected his poetry to always seek the leaping image and try to sound like Neruda or Rilke. But he has his own strong and amazing voice. So much to enjoy and think about.here. As he himself says in “Shabistari and the Secret Garden”: “When a poem takes me to a place where / No story ever happens twice, all I want / Is a warm room, and a thousand years of thought.” His poems take me to that place (even in a cold place like Minnesota!)
July 27, 2019
Better earlier than later, but my rating is closer to 4.25, if I wanted to pick a nit. Those early poems topple me, though.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews