At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Creeley found himself securely placed among the grand elder statesmen of American poetry. His Bollingen and Lannan awards cemented his critical reception. Yet not all critics are impressed by the kind of poetry his career presents. Writing in an article on Creeley’s mentor William Carlos Williams, Christopher MacGowan writes in The Columbia History of American Poetry that “The whole line of American poetry to which Williams is such an important figure, the line that includes such figures as Olson and Creeley, comes under similar attack from time to time.” A great deal has been written about him in the last fifty years, both positive and negative. Carol Muske Dukes has said that “some critics find that he is occasionally hyper-oblique, self-consciously cute, and for all his brevity, overwrought.” She quotes critic John Simon who said, “There are two things to be said about Creeley’s poems: They are short; they are not short enough.”

Other critics are more charitable. Don Byrd wrote that “When Creeley’s poetry is dull, as it sometimes is, it is the dullness of the real, and when it is exciting, as it often is, it is the excitement of the real.” Noting that Creeley began his career in rebellion against academic poets only to end up as an academic himself, Byrd distinguishes between academic and underground poets by their different approaches to poetry. “The academic poets, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, write writing as it is prepared: Creeley writes writing as it is written.” Writing in 1996, Bill Piper remarks on Creeley’s ability to avoid self-repetition when he states that, “Unlike many artists who reach a stride and remain with it, often becoming stale, he seems to diversify, and his work gains in interest with his deepening experience.”

In her review of Windows, the collection in which “Fading Light” was originally published, Penny Kaganoff relates the book’s title to its contents: “these carefully honed poems themselves function as ‘frames’ through which Creeley measures with mature insight and inventiveness the limits of reality and existence.” Numerous critics have remarked on the immediacy and directness of Creeley’s poetry, as does Terry R. Bacon, who declares, “Creeley’s perceptions are epiphanies: glimpses of moments in the life situation that are brought into sharp focus through the high energy transference that is presumed to occur.” In a 2002 review of Just in Time, Stephen Whited says, “The author’s comforting, bebop inner voice chatters away insistently, harmonizing and connecting moment with moment, like a Charlie Parker solo.” Remarking on the development of themes in Creeley’s work, Whited goes on to note, “Aging has changed the focus of the familiar subjects to whom the seventy-fiveyear- old Creeley continuously returns; the pleasant influence of narrative and memory has been more evident in his work since the mid-’80s.” Regardless of their enjoyment of his austere and oblique poetry, critics agree that Creeley has been a major influence on many younger poets and a significant presence in late twentieth-century American poetry.