When was robert creeley born

On March 30, , Creeley died at the age of Though Denise Levertov was born in England, she became known as one of the great American poets Read more about Robert Duncan John Wieners John Wieners lived on the periphery of several movements during his lifetime—the Beats, the National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine. Poets Search more than 3, biographies of contemporary and classic poets.

Robert Creeley — Photo credit: Chris Felver. Related Poets. Denise Levertov. Robert Duncan. John Wieners. Hilda Morley. Kathleen Fraser.

Charles Olson. John Wieners John Wieners lived on the periphery of several movements during his lifetime—the Beats, the Kathleen Fraser Kathleen Fraser was born on March 22, The effect of these two losses was dramatic and lifelong; it made Creeley feel perennially an outsider, outwardly aggressive but inwardly insecure, worried, edgy.

It also changed his circumstances, for his mother was forced to return to full-time work as a nurse, and the family moved to a farm which had originally been purchased by Creeley's father as a vacation home. Bright at school, Creeley won a scholarship to a New Hampshire boarding school and then attended Harvard, where his contemporaries included the political activist Mitchell Goodman and the novelist John Hawkes.

His teachers at Harvard were uninspiring though he affectionately recalled being taught by the poet Delmore Schwartz , but Creeley read widely, particularly among early English poets - Vaughan was a particular favourite. He returned to Harvard, and became involved in a student magazine started as an alternative to the Harvard Advocate, but he did not graduate, spending his time in Boston jazz clubs and with Ann MacKinnon, a girl he later described as "as dislocated as I was.

After an abortive effort to farm in New Hampshire, Creeley and his wife moved to Europe, where living was then much cheaper, and settled in Majorca in , living off a small trust fund of MacKinnon's. He was writing poems and beginning to send them out to other writers, and in he had began a voluminous four-year correspondence with the poet Charles Olson, then busy formulating his famous Projectivist tenets.

Although Olson is often cited as a mentor for Creeley, the influence cut both ways - Olson himself said he had learned more from Creeley "than from any other living man". Both poets were working against a dominant Anglo-American tradition of poetic forms, and struggling to create a new aesthetic for a freer kind of poetry.

Looked at in retrospect, much of the theory of Projective Verse seems nebulous and unconcrete - and Creeley himself subsequently downplayed the role of a formal poetics in his own work.

But the thrust was clear: both writers espoused an organic poetry, in which "form is never more than an expression of content"; they advocated a poetry which was immediate and therefore somehow more "real"; both looked happily outside literature for inspiration - Creeley to jazz and painting. But it showed Creeley that, despite an innate shyness, he could teach - and like teaching.

Moving on to San Francisco, he soon made friends with the members of its "renaissance"' - Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and Kenneth Rexroth among them - and included samples of their work in the final issue of Black Mountain Review. Creeley's early work was either self-published or appeared only with small presses, but For Love: poems was published by Scribners in , and brought him national attention - as did his appearance in Donald Allen's groundbreaking anthology The New American Poetry He also published a novel, The Island , based on his own unhappy first marriage and set in Majorca, but, despite Olson's belief that Creeley would write mainly fiction, he never wrote another.

A prolific writer he published more than 60 books Creeley was none the less a writer of such intense distillation that the critic Hugh Kenner once noted his poetry was sometimes so minimal that it was almost not there; less charitably, the waspish critic John Simon said there were two keys facts about Creeley's poems: "They are short; they are not short enough.

But what one critic called his "vigilant minimalism" can have powerful effects: as Creeley said, "You can't derail a train by standing directly in front of it. But, a tiny piece of steel, properly placed. Interestingly, despite its Kerouac-like spirit, the credo here is in fact more measured than many critics have suggested.

Unlike the Beats, and paradoxically unlike those more Formalist writers such as John Berryman and Robert Lowell, who had begun to write very personal "Confessional" poetry, Creeley in his work is decidedly impersonal.

As the poet J. McClatchy notes, Creeley seems "troubled by the problem of mediated utterance".