Plague (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
Although doubt and uncertainty are the climate of much of Creeley's poetry, there is a hard-won hope based on the trials of experience that resists despair or cynicism. In “Plague,” a poem written in terse two-line units which are like semidiscrete couplets that lean into each other, the world is described in those times when it has become “a pestilence! a sullen, inexplicable contagion” for the poet. Creeley reaches back toward the medical imagery of his father's life to form a figure for mental disorder, a figure which conveys the feeling of “a painful rush inward,...
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