Speaker
The majority of Creeley's poems have a first-person speaker. This figure often employs plainspoken language and slang while closely resembling Creeley himself. In some cases, like "For Love," which was dedicated to his then-wife Bobbie, this connection is obvious. The poem is almost confessional in tone, its content intensely emotional and knotted: "Now love also / becomes a reward so / remote from me I have / only made it with my mind." The speaker's struggle to give a proper explanation of love is so clearly tied to Creeley's own biography. Here, this relationship actually serves the poem, making its word more urgent and vulnerable. The speaker is not a persona; he is an extension of Creeley's own feelings. In other works, like "I Know a Man," it is more implied but still present. The poem begins in the middle of a conversation: "As I sd to my / friend, because I am / always talking,—John, I." The speaker shows himself clearly, and is tonally consistent with other poems, but does not quite announce a link between himself and Creeley.
Regardless of how closely Creeley identifies with his speakers, there are a number of commonalities between them. They write in clear, direct verse, always seeming to strive for concision. They have a tendency to be humorous but also vulnerable. They frequently appear to be writing towards an understanding of something that is troubling them, as if the poem is their attempt to make sense of the world. These ideas crop up in the middle section of "I Know a Man," when the speaker states: "the darkness sur- / rounds us, what / can we do against / it, or else, shall we & / why not." The speaker's casual diction initially conceals the deep existential dread that he is afflicted with.
Friend
In "I Know a Man," Creeley uses the character of a friend to bounce the speaker's point of view off of someone else. The speaker voices his concerns about the "darkness" he sees in the world around them. In opposition to this abstract worry, the speaker's friend bluntly tells him he should just "drive" and then later reminds him to drive more carefully, saying, "for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going." In this poem, Creeley introduces the speaker's friend as a way to contrast the speaker's tone and steer the conversation towards the concrete. His focus on immediate circumstances, the road, is a strong pushback on the speaker's loosely defined anxiety.
Aeneas
While Creeley did not always make allusions to literature in his writing, his poem "Heroes" names a few mythic figures from literature. The one he spends the most time on in the text is Aeneas, the central figure of Virgil's Aeneid who fled the siege of Troy and later founded the city of Rome. Creeley takes issue with the way Virgil characterizes him as simply rushing from one major event to the next, which he suggests paints him as inhuman. He describes only one instance in which he finds Aeneas human: "I thought the instant of the one humanness / in Virgil's plan of it / was that it was of course human enough to die, / yet to come back, as he said, hoc opus, hic labor est. / That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking." The scene he depicts is from the sixth book of the Aeneid, in which Aeneas journeys to the underworld to speak with his father. The priestess Sibyl warns him that going down is the easy part; it is the return that is the "labor." Creeley finds this moment human because Aeneas is demonstrating vulnerability, as his mortality is being highlighted, however briefly. He brings in this legendary character as a means of critiquing the way in which he is written about.
Wife
Creeley often includes the character of a wife in his poems. This is not particularly surprising given his focus on domestic spaces in his work. Much like his speakers, there is a great deal of overlap between these characters across poems. Also similarly, sometimes the characters show a clear link to Creeley's personal life and other times they are shown more opaquely. The poem "For Love" is dedicated to Creeley's second wife, Bobbie. As such, it is appropriate to read the "you" of the poem as the real-life person it is written to. When he writes, "What have you become to ask, / what have I made you into, / companion, good company," there is an overt, and affectionate, link between the text and their actual marriage.
However, in poems like "The World," while the central figures are a married couple, they appear to be distinct from people in Creeley's life. When the speaker describes how a "grey / figure came so close / and leaned over, / between us, as you / slept, restless," he seems to clearly move into the realm of the fantastic. Even as the poem grapples with real themes of domestic roles and grief, the supernatural element of it seems to situate it outside the actual events of Creeley's biography.
