Creeley, Robert

Creeley, Robert, 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.

Bibliography

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).

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Creeley, Robert (White) (1926–  ) poet, writer; born in Arlington, Mass. He studied at Harvard (1943–46), Black Mountain College (B.A. 1955), and the University of New Mexico (M.A. 1960). After extensive travel, he taught at New York State University: Buffalo (1966). Known for his poetry, as in Mirrors (1983), he also wrote criticism and fiction.