After trying unsuccessfully for years to imitate his hero, William Butler Yeats, Bly published his first book of poems, Silence in the Snowy Fields, in 1962.

For this and future work, Bly is credited with helping to introduce into poetry a fresh voice that celebrates the lyricism of Midwestern vernacular.

He started his own magazine in the late 1950s, which was first called The Fifties, then The Sixties and finally The Seventies. The magazine aimed to introduce South American and European poets to readers in the U.S. In fact, Bly learned Spanish in order to translate Pablo Neruda, whose poetry he loves for its "passion and fire."

"His magazines are one of his greatest contributions," says Porter University Professor Helen Vendler. "They were a powerful avenue for new writing."

A Rolling Stone...

Without the influence of new writing, Bly says, poetry will stagnate, which has led him to constantly mine for undiscovered talent.

Bly's most recent passion is the 13th century Persian poetry of Rumi.

"His poetry is a great blessing," Bly says. "It's a religious poetry without the heavy, hierarchical structure. It's ecstatic, treating God as if he were a lover."

Rumi's work has inspired Bly's recent poetry, which is based on the Islamic ghazal form.

It is this poetry, written in the last five years, that Bly says he thinks is his best work.

While Bly defines himself as a poet, he is perhaps most widely known not for his poetry but for his controversial 1989 book, Iron John: A Book About Men, which used a fairy tale to urge men to get in touch with their masculine, tribal nature.

But Bly says the book's success was a fluke.

"When my children were born [in the 1960s], I had to support them," he remembers. "I began to organize several conferences using fairy stories as a way to discuss the relations between men and women."

After searching through the tales collected by the Grimm Brothers for fairy tales about men, Bly began to "recognize in them remnants of ancient initiation rites for men in northern Europe, and male stages of growth imagined in the most ingenious way," he writes in the 35th reunion note.

His interpretation of these fairy tales was so popular with the men at his conference that they urged him to write a book.

"And then something strange happened," he remembers. "People actually started reading the thing. The book just ran away and became my illegitimate child."