Robert Bly began his studies in the 1940s at St. Olaf College in Minnesota but soon transferred to Harvard. There, he was introduced to formal poetry—particularly the classic British poets and modernists. He met and studied with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Adrienne Rich, and Donald Hall, who all became notable American poets from The New York School of Poets. These young writers—who rejected the modernists who came before them—were a tremendous influence on Bly, as were the Beat poets. Yet, although he wrote several poems while completing his degrees, he felt there were key elements missing from his work. He didn’t quite fit with either group of noted young poets.

In 1956, on a Fulbright Grant, Bly went to Norway to study and translate Norwegian poetry. Besides his work on Norwegian writers, he discovered the work of Spanish-language poets, including César Vallejo, Frederico Garcia Lorca, and Pablo Neruda. The surrealist imagery these poets employed deeply affected Bly and he realized he wanted to comparably enliven his own work. However, the urban landscape of New York City wasn’t for him. He settled back in Minnesota and began writing. These poems comprised his debut collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields.