Biography
Robert White Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, on May 21, 1926, two weeks before the birth of Allen Ginsberg in Newark, New Jersey. His parents were both from families that had been living in New England for generations, and his sister Helen was four years old when Oscar Slate Creeley, a physician married for the third time, and Genevieve Jules Creeley had their second child. When Dr. Creeley took his two-year-old son for a drive in an open car, a piece of coal shattered the windshield and a shard of glass cut Robert’s eye, leading to a series of infections which culminated in the removal of the eye when the young boy was five—one year after his father’s death. His mother moved to West Acton and became a public health nurse when Dr. Creeley died, and for the remainder of his childhood, Robert was raised in the care of aunts, grandmothers, and a maid named Theresa.
In 1940, Creeley entered Holderness School, a small boarding school in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where he published articles and stories in the Dial, the school literary magazine, which he edited in his senior year. Upon graduation in 1943, he entered Harvard University. After two years, Creeley joined the American Field Service and drove an ambulance in Burma and India; he then returned to Harvard for a second try. In 1946, he helped to edit the Harvard Wake’s special E. E. Cummings issue and published his first poem, “Return,” there. During this year, his schoolmates at Harvard included the poets Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery.
Creeley had just married Ann McKinnon, however, and one semester short of his degree in 1947, he left school and moved to a chicken farm in New Hampshire. His son David was born in October, 1948. His wife’s trust fund provided a meager subsistence, and he raised pigeons and chickens for additional income. His first public poetry reading took place in 1950 on Cid Corman’s radio program “This Is Poetry,” and Creeley began to gather manuscripts from contemporary writers for an alternative magazine to be called Lititz Review (for Lititz, Pennsylvania, the home of his coeditor Jacob Leed). Corman told Creeley about Charles Olson, the poet who was about to publish his groundbreaking “Projective Verse” essay. It moved that free verse poetry should embed itself in the process of one perception leading to deeper perceptions in order to attain a heightened sense of compositional energy. Creeley and Olson began a mammoth correspondence in which they both worked out the fundamental strictures of their poetic philosophies, and although the material for the magazine was not used immediately, Creeley placed some of it in Origin I and Origin II in 1951, including the first poems of Olson’s Maximum sequence.
Creeley and his family (now including three children) lived in France from 1951 to 1952 and then on the Spanish island of Mallorca from 1952 to 1955. His first book of poems, Le Fou, was published in 1952, and in 1953 he started the Divers Press, publishing his second book of poems, The Kind of Act Of, and publishing his first book of short fiction, The Gold Diggers, in 1954. In December of 1953, Olson, now the rector of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, asked Creeley to edit the Black Mountain Review. Creeley’s first issue of the influential magazine appeared in March, just before he arrived to teach at the college.
Creeley returned to Mallorca to try to repair his marriage but came to North Carolina to teach and edit the...
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review in 1955 after his divorce. That same year, his volume of poemsAll That Is Lovely in Men was published by Jonathan Williams. Creeley resigned from Black Mountain College in 1956, traveling to San Francisco, where he met Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and other members of the San Francisco renaissance. Later in the year, he moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to teach in an academy for boys and was presented with a B.A. by Olson from Black Mountain.
Creeley met and married Bobbie Louise Hoeck in 1957, began an M.A. at the University of New Mexico, and became the father of a daughter, Sarah, in November. Continuing his studies, he presented for his M.A. thesis a collection of poems and was granted the degree in 1960. He won the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine for a group of ten poems and was included in Donald Allen’s landmark anthology The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 (1960). He remained at the University of New Mexico through 1962 as a visiting lecturer, and in 1962, his first book of poems to gain national attention, For Love: Poems 1950-1960, was published. In 1962-1963, he lectured at the University of British Columbia, then returned to New Mexico, remaining there from 1963 to 1966. In 1963, after completing the spring semester, he contributed to the Vancouver Poetry Festival, which brought together Olson, Robert Duncan, Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and others Creeley had met while he edited the Black Mountain Review.
Late in 1963, his novel The Island was published, and in 1964, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. His friend Olson had begun to teach at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and Creeley participated in the Buffalo Arts Festival in 1965. In the following year, he accepted a position as a visiting professor at Buffalo, and in 1967, he was appointed professor of English there, a position he held until 1978.
Scribners published his second major collection of poems, Words, in 1967, and in 1968, Creeley returned to the University of New Mexico as a visiting professor for one year. Scribners published his next collection, Pieces, in 1969; a book of early and uncollected poems, The Charm, was issued by the Four Seasons Foundation in that year. Creeley also recorded two readings of his work. He spent the 1970-1971 academic year as a visiting professor at San Francisco State College and took part in poetry festivals in Texas and Belgium. In an attempt to conclude a peripatetic existence that had gone on for more than two decades, Creeley established a permanent residence in Buffalo in 1973 and began to take a very active interest in the cultural affairs of the city, working against the prevailing academic disinclination to bring literature to a wider segment of the population.
Continuing to travel extensively, Creeley took part in a poetry festival in Toronto in 1975 and spent the spring of 1976 reading his work in Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Japan, and Korea, sponsored by the United States Information Agency (USIA). Scribners published a volume of his Selected Poems in 1976; Mabel: A Story and Other Prose was published by Marion Boyars in London, an indication of his growing international reputation. At the end of the year, he was divorced from his second wife, and in 1977, he married Penelope Highton.
In 1979, Creeley began to publish poetry with the innovative, pioneering New Directions Press, founded and run by James Laughlin. Their association began with Later (1979), a volume that marked a ripening, more reflective turn in Creeley’s style. Creeley returned to the University of New Mexico as a visiting professor in 1979, 1980, and 1981. In 1980, Black Sparrow Press published the first two volumes of his historic correspondence with Olson, an exchange of letters that was both a record of a special friendship and an epistolary analysis of postmodern poetry and poetics.
His son William Gabriel was born in 1981, the same year Creeley received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a further indication of how much his work had become a part of the main current of American poetry. In 1982, he augmented his position as a major figure in American literature with the publication of The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975, a book that Creeley regarded as a coherent expression of his work which had “a sense of increment, of accumulation . . . that is very dear to me.” New Directions followed this volume with Creeley’s work over the next four years in Mirrors (1983), and in December of that year his daughter Hannah Highton was born.
Creeley spent the winter of 1983-1984 in Berlin on a Berlin Artists Program Grant, then served on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Literature Fellowship Panel in 1984. In that year, he turned again toward his New England origins by establishing a residence in Waldoboro, Maine, behind his sister Helen’s house.
In 1986, his third collection from New Directions, Memory Gardens, was published, a book which offered many reflections about members of his immediate family. The seventh and eighth volumes of Creeley’s correspondence with Olson were published in 1987, and two years later, the University of California Press issued The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley, a companion volume to the Collected Poems and a book which, in gathering most of Creeley’s theoretical, critical, autobiographical, and occasional prose into one collection, provided further evidence of the weight and influence of his thinking about literature. In 1990, New Directions published Windows, Creeley’s eleventh book of poetry. Creeley continued to teach at the State University of New York, holding the Samuel P. Capen Professorship of Poetry and Humanities, and he was honored by his community with the title New York State Poet for 1989-1991. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999 and joined the faculty at Brown University in 2003. He died of pneumonia while in residence in Odessa, Texas, on March 30, 2005. He was seventy-eight.