Robert Creeley was born in 1926 in Arlington, Massachusetts. As a young child, he lost the use of his left eye after an accident. As a teenager, he went to the Holderness School in New Hampshire, where he developed a budding interest in writing, contributing often to the school's literary magazine. He attended Harvard University briefly but felt discouraged by the attitude of his professors and left to join the armed forces. Despite this visual impairment, he served in the U.S. Army during the Second World War. He was an ambulance driver in both Southeast Asia and India.
After returning from the war, he became involved with Black Mountain College, a small, experimental institution in North Carolina. The school was known for being the foundational spot for a group of writers known as the Black Mountain Poets. Creeley started an epistolary relationship with poet Charles Olson which developed into a close friendship. After this, Creeley became a principal member of this movement, along with figures like Joel Oppenheimer, Ed Dorn, Paul Blackburn, Hilda Morley, and Olson. Olson's celebrated essay "Projective Verse" offers some insight into the stylistic goals of this moment. He stated that they believed poetry should seek to break away from traditional, "closed" forms and seek out verse centered on joining together perceptions. The essay also emphasized the line as the most important structural element of a poem. These poets, through different means, pursued work that unified its content and structure through sensation and feeling. After graduating from Black Mountain College, Creeley was drawn to the poetry scene of San Francisco in 1956. There he met notable literary figures such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The unconventional stylistic techniques of the Beats, of which Ginsberg and Kerouac were figureheads, left a lasting impact on Creeley. He then migrated to New Mexico where he received a master's degree and began working there as a teacher while raising a family with his wife, Bobbie Louise Hall. During this period, Creeley's work was respected but not well-known in wider literary circles.
This changed with the publication of his 1962 collection, For Love, which elicited significant critical attention and cemented his status at the forefront of American poets of his time. He became known for his subtly experimental, deeply human approach to poetry. Many critics remarked on the intimacy and accessibility they found while reading his work. His other major collections include Later (1979) and Life and Death (1998). In the eighties, Creeley began to develop a slightly sparser style, which would become his primary mode in the later part of his career. He eventually moved to the University of Buffalo, where he would teach for several decades. In his later life, he published a number of well-reviewed collections including En Famille: A Poem by Robert Creeley (1999); Thinking (2000); Just In Time: Poems, 1984-1994 (2001); and If I Were Writing This (2003). In 2005, Creeley died in Odessa, Texas, at the age of 78.
“Heroes” is a poem by American author Robert Creeley about the afterlife of myths and legends. The poem first appeared in his 1960 collection For Love: Poems, 1950–1960, and was republished in The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1945-1975....
“I Know a Man” is a poem by American author Robert Creeley that deals with the problem of finding meaning in contemporary life. First published in 1955, it later appeared as part of his 1991 collection, Selected Poems of Robert Creeley. Creeley...
Robert Creeley (1926 - 2005) was an American writer commonly associated with the group known as the Black Mountain Poets. He is now widely recognized as one of the most influential poets of the last half-century. He was known for his compressed...
"The World" is a poem by American writer Robert Creeley. First published in 1962, the poem describes a man struggling to provide comfort to his wife in the middle of the night. Creeley was a prominent member of the Black Mountain Poets, a group of...
