Robert Creeley

Robert White Creeley (May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005) was an American poet and teacher.

Creeley was born in West Acton, Massachusetts. His father was a doctor who died when Creeley was very young. An accident caused him to lose his left eye before he was five years old.

In 1943, he started at Harvard University. He left Harvard to serve in the American Field Service in Burma and India in 1944–1945. His first poem was printed at Harvard in 1946.

In 1954 the poet Charles Olson asked Creeley to come and teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Creeley would also edit the Black Mountain Review. That college brought together many artists, poets, dancers, and musicians. It was a center for much new art from 1933 to 1957.

At Black Mountain and later, Creeley connected with other poets who shared ideas about poetry. These others included Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, and Philip Whalen.

In his first important book, For Love, Creeley wrote poems that cared about "the sounds and rhythms of language" and how words were put on the page. One critic said, "We recognise Creeley’s poems first by what they leave out: he uses few long or rare words, no regular metres and almost no metaphors.”

Creeley won many awards. He received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Rockefeller Foundation grant. He was Professor of Poetry and Humanities at the State University of New York, Buffalo. And he was the New York State poet from 1989 to 1991.

Books
The Gold Diggers and Other Stories (1961)
For Love: Poems 1950–1960 (1962)
The Island (1963)
The Finger (1968)
Later (1979)
The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975 (1982)
Mirrors (1983)
Memory Gardens (1986)
Selected Poems 1945–1990 (1991)
Echoes (1994)
Life & Death (1998)
Just in Time: Poems 1984–1994 (2001)   
If I Were Writing This (2003)

 Related pages 
List of poets from North America

References

Other websites
Robert Creeley at PennSound

Category:1926 births
Category:2005 deaths
Category:American poets
Category:American teachers