Robert Creeley Biography Quotes 15 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Robert Creeley was born in 1926 in Massachusetts and grew up in the Boston area during the economic and social uncertainties of the Depression. His father died when he was young, and a childhood accident left him blind in one eye, circumstances that pressed him inward and sharpened his attention to nuance, tone, and the feel of spoken language. He was educated at boarding school in New England and later entered Harvard during World War II. He left before graduating to serve overseas with the American Field Service, driving ambulances in Asia. The experience of displacement and the intimate proximity to others' lives and losses would remain key elements in his poetics. After the war, he returned to his studies and to writing, gravitating toward a community of correspondents and mentors that would shape his career.

Finding a Community and a Voice
Early on, Creeley developed vital exchanges with fellow poets who were exploring new measures for American verse. He wrote to and learned from William Carlos Williams, whose emphasis on everyday speech helped confirm Creeley's sense that the line could be built from breath and perception rather than inherited meters. Through Cid Corman and his magazine Origin, Creeley came into print and into conversation with a circle eager to rethink the American lyric. With his first wife he lived for a time on the island of Mallorca, where he founded Divers Press, publishing work by friends and contemporaries such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Paul Blackburn. Editorial work, small-press printing, and a life lived close to letters were for Creeley not sidelines but ways of being a poet among poets.

Black Mountain College and the New American Poetry
Creeley's correspondence with Charles Olson led to an invitation to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he taught, edited, and helped articulate the practice that later critics grouped under the term Black Mountain poets. As editor of The Black Mountain Review he fostered writing by Olson, Duncan, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, and others who would anchor Donald Allen's influential anthology The New American Poetry, 1945, 1960. Olson's essay "Projective Verse", which cited a line of Creeley's, "form is never more than an extension of content", became a touchstone for poets seeking to free the poem to the facts and pressures of present feeling. Creeley's own poems from this period, spare and sharply weighted, offered a model of maximum emotion carried in minimal means, the line tuned to the breath and to the smallest inflection of voice.

Publications and Collaborations
Across the 1950s and 1960s, Creeley's books established a distinctive presence: short lyrics that could feel at once intimate and austere, grounded in the dailiness of love, friendship, and work. A short-story collection, The Gold Diggers, and a novel, The Island, revealed his interest in narrative pressures and the limits of speech under strain. Volumes such as For Love gathered the poems that positioned him as a central figure of postwar American writing, while later titles, Words, Pieces, and A Day Book, explored the edges of perception and the habits of attention. He often collaborated with artists, working on projects with painters and printmakers like Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, and Francesco Clemente, believing that the poem's field could share a surface with image and gesture. The critic's role never tempted him as much as the interlocutor's: interviews, letters, and the editing of others' work were continuous with his poetry, acts of thinking aloud in company.

Teaching, Travel, and the Poetics of Company
Creeley taught widely, first in the South and Southwest and later for decades at the University at Buffalo (SUNY Buffalo), where he helped build a vibrant community of poets and scholars. The classroom and the reading circuit were extensions of his open, questioning poetics; he was a frequent presence at gatherings such as the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, where discussions with Olson, Duncan, and Levertov tested the reach of projective measures in front of audiences hungry for new forms. He read and traveled with fellow writers across North America and abroad, sharing stages with figures from the Beats and the broader postwar avant-garde, including Allen Ginsberg and others whose work pressed on the same questions of speech, measure, and social presence. His teaching emphasized the mutual pressure of life and poem: what is said must fit the breath, and the breath must acknowledge the world it moves through.

Style and Influence
Creeley's poems are often very short, but never slight. He pared language to bone, trusting cadence, hesitation, and repetition to carry emotional complexity. Love and its failures, friendship, responsibility, and the daily negotiations of the self recur, set in rooms, kitchens, small apartments, and open roads. The syntax tightens, then breaks; silence is treated as a word's neighbor, not its enemy. Younger poets learned from his restraint and from his example as a maker among makers, one who wrote, published, corresponded, and put his shoulder to the distribution of new work. The influence of Charles Olson and Robert Duncan is evident in his attention to measure, but Creeley's ear remained singular, as did his insistence that the poem be a place of honesty. Donald Allen's anthology fixed his centrality for a generation of readers, and continuing relationships with Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Paul Blackburn, and Cid Corman kept his work in a live field of debate and care.

Personal Life and Ongoing Work
Creeley's life crossed many geographies: New England childhood, European sojourns, the high desert of New Mexico, and a long tenure in upstate New York. He married more than once and raised a family, often writing about the intricate weave of domestic feeling and artistic commitment. Friends like the photographer Elsa Dorfman documented his presence over the decades, capturing the public warmth and private intensity that readers also found in his lines. He continued to publish well into his later years, bringing out volumes that register aging, illness, and love with the same stripped clarity that marked his early work. Late books such as Life & Death and If I Were Writing This maintain the pressure of the ordinary against the overarching themes that close a life.

Later Years and Legacy
In the early 2000s, Creeley accepted new appointments and residencies, expanding his circle of students and collaborators while remaining grounded in the commitments that had birthed his poetry: attention to breath, the close fact, and the company of others. He died in 2005 while traveling for readings in Texas. By then he had become, without fanfare, a figure whose name signaled a way of working as much as a body of work. Editors, printers, anthologists, and poets, from William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson to Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Cid Corman, Paul Blackburn, and Allen Ginsberg, mark out the social map in which his poems live. His collected poems present a life in measure: decades of learning how little a line needs in order to say what matters, and how much a poet needs the company of others to keep the saying honest.

Our collection contains 15 quotes who is written by Robert, under the main topics: Wisdom - Writing - Deep - Poetry - Time.

Other people realated to Robert: Diane Wakoski (Poet), James Laughlin (Poet)