The poet Robert Bly, who counted the National Book Award and the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal among his many honours, has died.

The Star Tribune newspaper, in his native Minnesota, said Bly died on Sunday.

“One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life,” he wrote.

Summing up his career, the Star Tribune said Bly “started out writing bucolic poems about rural Minnesota and went on to shake up the complacent world of 1950s poetry, rail against war, bring international poets to western readers, and become a best-selling author teaching men how to be in touch with their feelings”.

In 2016, New York magazine described Bly as “a media-friendly shaman for a strange, mythopoetic men’s-liberation movement … [a] flowering of men’s self-help workshops and books [that] managed to be both New Age and retrograde” and which “emerged genuinely out of feminism or at least claimed an alliance with it, and had as its mega-selling quasi-manifesto Bly’s Iron John: A Book about Men”.

Bly, Rylance wrote, “had this penetrating ability to see what was going on and he didn’t have any shyness about saying it.

Referring to Bly’s extensive work as a translator, Rylance wrote: “The most profound thing that an elder man can do for a younger man is to mentor and encourage a particular gift

“He was a great poet and a great dad,” she said