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Back to ArticlesRobert Creeley (1926-2005)
Robert White Creeley, whose prolific work as a poet, essayist and teacher spanned more than five decades, died on March 30 of pneumonia at a hospital in Odessa, Texas. He was 78.
In 1946, Creeley published his first poem in the Harvard magazine Wake, and soon after began corresponding with William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. But it was his friendship with Charles Olson that would ultimately lead him to the socially-progressive climes of Black Mountain College in North Carolina where, at Olson’s invitation, he joined the faculty and edited the prestigious Black Mountain Review.
Guided by a relentless exploration of intimate human emotions, Creeley drew inspiration from not only contemporaries like Williams and Allen Ginsberg, but also from jazz musicians and their free-form sensibilities.
He was witness to—and an influence on—the major poetic movements of his time, but Creeley maintained an independent vision, eschewing the fashionable literary trends of protest and social liberation for a more muted quest for complex individual truth.
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, Creeley tirelessly devoted his life to his art, publishing more than sixty books of poetry, in addition to more than a dozen books of prose, essays and interviews. He served as New York State Poet Laureate from 1989 to 1991 and was the recipient of numerous honors, including the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation.
Creeley taught for 37 years at the State University of New York at Buffalo before taking a post at Brown University in 2003. He was in Texas as part of a Lannan Foundation literary residency.
He will be laid to rest in the Cambridge, Massachusetts cemetery shared by poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
—William Haskins