Showing results for "Robert Bly" in Literature & Fiction

During this talk, Iron John author Robert Bly gives a delicate and lively view of the fantastic flowering of feeling in 12th century Provence. The feeling thought, developed from Arabic, Gnostic, and Albigensian sources, blossoms as love poetry famous at that time. In this recording, Bly distinguishes between the literal mode, the psychological mode, and the mythological mode, and locates the “Amor” or ecstatic love in the latter, which led to Sufism among the Arabs.

These broadcast quality archival recordings have been edited down into an amazing journey led by Robert Bly, one of America's greatest and entertaining thinkers. This audio explores the poetry of Yeats and goes deep into the author's biography to help bring to light the inspirations of Yeat's great works.

Jalaluddin Rumi is unquestionably one of the greatest spiritual poets of the world. This audio features Robert Bly and Coleman Barks each reading his own versons of Rumi. Brilliant musical accompaniment provides playfulness and ground to great spiritual expression.

A poet, translator, and social theorist, Bly has published more than 30 collections of poetry, including The Light Around the Body (1967), which won a National Book Award, and most recently Stealing Sugar from the Castle: Selected Poems (2013). His honors include fellowships from Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.

Robert Bly is in beautiful form, reading seven of his own poems from Stealing Sugar from the Castle, and Coleman Barks reads some segments from the Shams Tabrizi Sayings, as well as Rumi poems.

"As a man is, so he sees." These words of mystical poet and artist William Blake are just as relevant now as they were when they were written in 1802 - perhaps more so. Throughout his life, Blake undertook a voyage beyond rationality and materialism to an interior, visionary realm where "all things appear as they are - infinite." Yet all human beings, he believed, are capable of opening their eyes to a fuller experience of life.

We are delighted to offer this excerpt from The Poems of Rumi as read by Coleman Barks, leading scholar and translator of Rumi poetry, and Robert Bly, poet, author, and leader of the men's movement. Jalaluddin Rumi is a beloved as a spiritual master and one of the greatest poets of all time.