Robert Bly

The deeper question... is not whether ancient religious forms can reform... but whether new forms of nature-related spirituality might emerge...

— Robert Bly

There's a quality we could call vertical attention, which is an attention upward toward ancestors, spiritual states, angels, gods.

— Robert Bly

“They wrote to me and said something about it, and I said that if it doesn't involve any work, I'll do it.…

— Robert Bly

In some Mayan villages they even have a stage beyond the elder that they call the Echo Person. They say that when…

— Robert Bly

Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.

— Robert Bly

Some men live with an invisible limp, stagger, or drag a leg. Their sons are often angry.

— Robert Bly

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single…

— Robert Bly

There is no hierarchy in Japanese Buddhist poetry.

— Robert Bly

The language you use for your poems should be the language you use with your friends.

— Robert Bly

Hierarchy, as in the Catholic Church, has to do with power, and vertical attention has to do with longing.

— Robert Bly