Robert Elwood Bly was born in Madison, Minnesota, and grew up on a farm nearby. After two years in the navy, he enrolled in Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and in the fall of 1947 transferred to Harvard, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1950. Returning to northern Minnesota to live, he had a chance to read and to study poetry on his own before pursuing graduate study at the University of Iowa. In 1955 he married Carolyn McLean, and the next year he received an M.A. from the University of Iowa and a Fulbright grant to visit Norway and to translate Norwegian poetry into English. Impressed with the works of foreign poets who were neglected in the United States, he determined to start a magazine devoted to publishing poetry in translation. He settled on a farm near Madison, Minnesota, and in 1958 began the Fifties magazine and...