Creeley, Robert

Related Category: American Literature: Biographies

1926–2005, American poet, b. Arlington, Mass. He lived in Asia, Europe, and Latin America and taught at various universities in the United States. With Charles Olson, he was a leading member of the Black Mountain school of poetry and for a time (1954–57) was editor of the Black Mountain Review. Creeley's poems have an effect of purity and elegance, with their combination of emotional directness and reticence, their conversational tone, brevity of development, and spare lyricism. His works include the poetry of Pieces (1969), Selected Poems (1976), Memory Gardens (1986), Echoes (1994), Life & Death (1998), Just in Time (2001), and the posthumously published On Earth (2006), and a novel, The Island (1963). Creeley was also a short-story writer and essayist. In addition, from the 1960s on he collaborated on a variety of projects with such artists as Robert Indiana, Georg Baselitz, R. B. Kitaj, Alex Katz, and Susan Rothenberg. Creeley's collected poems were published in 1982 and 1998 and his collected prose in 1984.

See his Autobiography (1990); correspondence with Charles Olson, ed. by G. F. Butterick (8 vol., 1980–87); correspondence with Irving Layton, ed. by E. Faas and S. Reed (1990); studies by A. Mandel (1974), C. D. Edelberg (1978), A. L. Ford (1978), J. Wilson, ed. (1987), T. Clark (1993), A. Cappellazzo and E. Licata, ed. (1999), and L. Rifkin (2000).