American poet, translator, editor, and author, perhaps best-known to the public at large as the author of Iron John: A Book About Men (1990, reprinted 2001 as Iron John: Men and Masculinity). Drawing upon Jungian psychology, myth, legend, folklore, fairy tales (the title is taken from a story by the Grimm Brothers (Grimm, Brothers)), the book demonstrates Bly's masculinist convictions. Though it had many detractors, it proved an important, creative, and best-selling work on the subject of manhood and masculinity for a budding men's movement in the United States.

After serving in the U.S. Navy, Bly studied at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota (1946–47), Harvard University (B.A., 1950), and the University of Iowa (M.A., 1956). In 1958 he cofounded the magazine The Fifties (its name changed with the decades), which published translations and poetry by Bly and other important young poets. Bly's first collection of poems, Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962), reveals his sense of man in nature. It was followed by The Light Around the Body (1968), which won a National Book Award. His later poems and “prose poems” were published in volumes such as Sleepers Joining Hands (1973), This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977), This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (1979), Morning Poems (1997), and Eating the Honey of Words (1999). Bly also translated the work of many poets, ranging from Rainer Maria Rilke (Rilke, Rainer Maria) (German), Knut Hamsun (Hamsun, Knut) (Norwegian), Tomas Tranströmer (Tranströmer, Tomas) (Swedish), and Pablo Neruda (Neruda, Pablo) and Antonio Machado (Machado, Antonio) (Spanish) to the 15th-century Indian mystic Kabir (Kabīr) (in Bengali translation).

His poems of The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981) explore themes of male grief and the father-son connection that he developed further in Iron John and also The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine (1999), written with Marion Woodman.

A collection of Bly's prose poems appeared in 1992 under the title What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?. His later collections of poetry include Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (1994) and The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (2001).