"It was a playful thing, we looked upon it with optimism," Bly says. "This was different than the mood of people coming out of the Vietnam War."

This victory lent a sort of heroic quality to the class.

"There is a certain mystery about that group, and that time," he says. "Many of us have had numerous different careers, for instance."

Like many aspiring writers who have since become household names, Bly says he "bluffed his way onto the Advocate, and never regretted it."

"We'd sit up half the night arguing about which poems would go into the magazine," Bly remembers. "Then, T.S. Eliot [Class of 1910] would come by and we'd all get drunk."

One month, Bly recalls, the magazine was low on funding, so he decided to print unpublished poems Eliot had written as an undergraduate. When the issue came out, he says, he received a letter from Eliot telling him that if he had wanted the poems printed, he would have printed them himself.

"It was a firm rebuke, but affectionately said," Bly remembers.

Many of the aspiring writers in the Class were members of Archibald MacLeish's first creative writing class, Bly writes in an entry in the 35th reunion book for the class.

"To him, Ezra Pound was literally a fallible but admirable friend," Bly writes.

This sort of casual contact with literary legends is "the advantage of going to a place like Harvard," Bly says.

Bly and the plethora of other aspiring poets who wrote for the Advocate also spent much of their time in the Grolier Bookstore, a place he describes as "our real home."

The bookstore's owner would often recommend new books of poetry to Bly. Sometimes, Robert Frost would even come into the store to browse.

"It was a real community for poets," Bly says. "I don't know if that still exists."

Poetry on Lake Wobegon

Five years after his graduation, Bly married and moved back to an abandoned farm in Minnesota, far from the Minneapolis suburbs where he was raised.

"In return for the boredom of country life...we received solitude, free time, the night stars and a certain clarity that comes when you feel abandoned," he writes in his 35th reunion note.