Robert Bly (1926- ) was born in western Minnesota, and attended Harvard University and the University of Iowa. He is a prolific author who has published more than thirty books of poetry, edited a magazine to introduce foreign poets to an English audience, and given workshops on masculinity based on his book Iron John: A Book about Men, the founding text of the mythopoetic Men's Movement. In his early poems such as "Driving toward the Lac Qui Parle River" and "Waking from Sleep," Bly uses descriptions of American geography to evoke a feeling of solitude and isolation and to reveal a consciousness merging those emotions with landscapes.