CREELEY, ROBERT (WHITE)

born May 21, 1926, Arlington, Mass., U.S. U.S. poet and founder of the Black Mountain movement of the 1950s (see Black Mountain poets). Creeley dropped out of Harvard University in the last semester of his senior year and spent a year driving a truck in India and Burma for the American Field Service. Soon after his return in 1945, he lived on a poultry farm in New Hampshire and, by his own account, spent much time listening to jazz. Motivated by a Boston radio program of poetry readings that he chanced to hear, he began to publish his poems in small magazines. He lived in France in the early 1950s and then moved to Majorca, Spain, where he started the Divers Press. In 1955, after receiving a B.A. from Black Mountain College (North Carolina), he joined Charles Olson on its faculty and was editor of the Black Mountain Review for its first three years. The Review published poems by the then little-known Creeley, as well as poems by various other faculty members and poets. Creeley's poems of the 1950s and 1960s reveal the influence of William Carlos Williams. In For Love (1962), the collection of poems written between 1950 and 1960, Creeley emerged as a master technician. Like Williams' poems, Creeley's are short and to the point. In his later books of poetry, most notably Pieces (1968), Creeley's poems are equally self-contained. His poetry, characterized by understatement, down-to-earth flippancy, and a studious adherence to economic and precise language, has influenced many younger poets. Creeley taught poetry in several universities and from 1967 was a member of the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo. His Selected Poems appeared in 1976. Later collections include Later (1979), The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 19451975 (1982), Memory Gardens (1986), and Windows (1990).