Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Creeley

Creeley rigs a quiet showdown between two kinds of survival: poetry as craft and prose as function. The line lands with a wry, almost rueful shrug - not because he dismisses poetry, but because he’s honest about what it often gets asked to do. Poetry “survived in its formal agencies”: it kept breathing through its apparatus, its line breaks, its meters, its sanctioned techniques. The word “agencies” is doing sly work here, making form sound like an institution, a set of tools with their own bureaucracy. Poetry persists, yes, but partly by clinging to the very mechanisms that can turn it into a self-enclosed system.

Then comes the pivot: “and that prose survived to get something said.” Prose isn’t romanticized; it’s credited. It lasts because it’s useful, because it’s built to deliver meaning across distance without requiring a priesthood of interpretation. Creeley’s subtext is a critique of mid-century poetic preciousness - the risk that poetry becomes an internal conversation about technique, while the world is on fire and language is being industrialized by politics, advertising, and mass media.

Context matters: Creeley, a key figure in postwar American poetry (Black Mountain, projective verse), argued for a lean, speech-inflected line where form follows breath and attention, not inherited ornament. So this isn’t a plea for prose dominance; it’s a dare to poetry. If prose gets “something said” by default, poetry has to earn its survival by making form itself a method of saying - not a refuge from it.