LESSONS FROM WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
ROBERT CREELEY'S EARLY POETRY
By LYNN
KELLER
Like many artists coming of age during the "global nightmare" of
World War II, Robert Creeley in the early 1940s was bursting with
"much confusion and pain wanting statement in its own terms." 1
That desire, however, was frustrated by the literary establishment:
"the colleges and universities were dominant in their insistence upon
an idea of form extrinsic to the given instance" and in their "assumption of a mold" to which a poet's expression should conform (QG, p.
42). Consequently, as Creeley has often recalled, he felt tremendously exhilarated and liberated upon discovering an alternative approach in William Carlos Williams's introduction to The Wedge
(1944):
Therefore each speech having its own character the poetry it
engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic
form . . . .
When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes
words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes
them-without distortion which would mar their exact significances-into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors
that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses.2
1 Robert Creeley, Contexts of Poetry lnterv1ews 1961-1971, ed. Donald Allen (Bolinas,
Cahf.: Four Seasons Foundation, 1973), p. 9 (hereafter cited Contexts); and .'I. QuiCk Graph:
Collected Xotes and Essays, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco. Four Seasons Foundation,
1970). p 42 (hereafter cited QG).
2 The Collected Later Poems ofWtUwm Carlos W1Uwms, rev. ed. (New York: New Directions,
1963), pp 4-5, hereafter Cited CLP. See also QG, p 44.
369
370
WILLIAMS AND GREELEY
Williams was calling for "a direct expression of the turmoils of today
in the arts. Not about today in classical forms but in forms generated.
invented, today direct from the turmoil itself. . . ."" 3 So in 1945when Creeley was eighteen and Williams, at sixty-one. was considered only a minor poet-the voung man "put [him]selfto school with
[Williams's) work,"'4 studying whatever poetry or prose he could find.
It is the purpose of this essay to trace the lessons of that formative
schooling as they are revealed in Creeley"s earlv \·olumes of poetry.
After five years, a few published lyrics, and much scrutiny of Williams's work, Creelev summoned the courage to contact the master
by mail. Williams then directly assumed the role of mentor, offering
Creeley encouragement, answering his questions, commenting on his
style. and putting him in touch with like-minded writers-among
them, Charles Olson. 5 During the early fifties Creeley and Olson carried on an intense and frequent exchange of lengthy letters about the
making of poems. 6 It is not surprising. then. that Creeley's poetry of
this period should be more obviously imitati\·e of Olson-and Olson's master, Pound-than of Williams. The works in Creeley"s first
mlume, Le Fou (composed from 1950 to 1952). 7 tend to look like Olson's projective compositions. (In some instances Creeley even allm,:ed Olson to rearrange their lineation.)8 The lines are grouped in
irregular units. spaced and indented to indicate the conceptual relations between the poems' parts; Olson-hke mannerisms-shorthand
·'&""and "sd."" open or closed parentheses-abound: the con,·entions
of syntax are broken open in Olson's fashion. ~lany of these poems.
like Olson's, move by intellectual analvsis or rational argument: abstract propositions are stated and then elaborated, demonstrated. or
qualified in an impersonal manner:
< "Letter to an Australian Ednor." BnarcbffQuarti!TlJ, 3. no 11(0ctober 1946). 207
_, Creeley to Williams, februan· II. 1950: quoted bv Paul Mariam. ''"fire of a \"en Real
Order·· Creeley and Williams," boundal} 2, 6. no. 3-7. no. 1 (Springifalll978), 175
' Mariani pro,·ides thorough and engaging documentation of the correspondence between Williams and Greeley As he himself notes. however. "Williams· most deeply__felt in:
ftuence on Creeley was not the correspondence. It lay, rather. m the fact of Wdhams
poems"" lp 181). The fact ofthe poem •~ m\· concern here. I have tried as much as possible
to avmd duplicatmg material Manani uses
h Their correspondence between April and September 1950 has been published m
Charles Olson and Robert Cuele;. The Complete Correspondence. I-II. ed. George f Buttenck
(Santa Barbara: Black Swallow Press. 1980}
7 Some of the poems in Le Fou have been reprinted 111 The Charm Early and Cncollected
Plil'ms (San francisco. Four Seasons foundation. 1969). pp. 17-32. and othen; in For Lm.,e
Poems 1950-1960 (!llew York: Charles Scnbner"s Sons. l962i, pp 15-25 These volumes are
cued hereafter as Charm and FL. respecuvelv
"This mformatron comes from Cvnthia Dubm Edelberg. Robert Greeley's PoetT\· A Cntzcal
371
LYNK KELLER
love
Not enough. The question: what is.
Given: grace
the time of this moment
which I do not see as time.
The particulars: oak, the grain of, oak.
(Charm, p. 27)
Yet several allusions to Williams's work in this volume indicate that
the New Jersey poet continued to define and embody Creeley's artistic ideal. In "helas" (Charm, p. 20) Creeley's lines "(nothing else but I
to bite home! there, where I the head could take hold . . . )" echo
Williams's definition of the poet in "The Wind Increases":
a man
whose words will
bite
their way
home-being actual
having the form
ofmotion9
In Williams's poem the wind tossing the spring flowers is procreative;
it is also the poet's breath, his words. These words, the exhalation of
love, bring something "new II upon the tortured I body of thought,"
offering the mind relief by connecting it with the earth's generative
forces. Hence, in the windswept world of Williams's poem, objects
are sharply defined-"tulip's bright I tips," "twigtip," "leaftip." Creeley longs for such contact, such clarity. He invokes Williams's lyric as
a foil against which he juxtaposes his own alienation from sensual
particularity and from the keen defining power of language. For
Creeley, "The day is the indefinite," and the wind merely pushes his
head in circles, leaving his senses of sight and hearing "vague." By
denying two of Williams's most positive terms-"no edge I or delight" -the contemporary poet defines his dispirited condition as antithetical to the modernist's. He upholds the older poet as a model,
both for what Williams does with words and for how that doing
brings him into emotional and sensual contact with his world.
lntroductton (Albuquerque. Umversitv of !'iew Mexico Press. 1978). pp. 7-8: Edelberg
identifies "helas" as an example.
9 The Collected Earlrer Poems of Wrllram Carlos Wrllrams {l'l:ew York New Directions, 1951 ),
pp 68-69; hereafter cited CEP
3i2
WILLIAMS AND GREELEY
Again in "love" Creeley uses Williams to represent states of mind
he would like to attain. Disappointed that love is "Not enough,'" Creeley pleads. "speak to me, of love . . . "; the response-" . . . the slam
of love zs upon the world!''-is an exclamation from Williams's "Love
Song" (CEP, p. li4). In Williams's poem, love transforms the entire
world; because his beloved is absent he finds the "honey-thick'' yellow
of desire "spoiling the colors I of the whole world.·· This all-consuming passion leaves no room for anxious questions like Creeley's "what
is [enough?]"
In these years. when Creeley was most unhappy and uncertain,
Williams seems to have been more important as a personal than a
prosodic example. The young man looked to the older as one who
shared his own doubts and handicaps and succeeded as an artist despite or because of them. Thus Creeley's early poem "For W. C. W ...
(FL. p. 32) pays tribute to Williams's abilin: to transform private pain
into creative energy that ·'sustains" him through anguished periods.10 Williams is Creeley's model of one who e\·en in "time of trouble'" can feel "a wild exultation ...
Creelev regarded Williams as a man who originally shared his own
''Puritanically deprived senses of speech and sensualitv" (QG, p. 61).
yet had managed to free himself from those fetters. The young man
was "shy of the word ·poet' and all its associations'" <QG, p. 61): he
found comfort in Williams's awkwardness with that designation: ''I
am a poet! I ! am. I am. I am a poet. I reaffirmed, ashamed . . . . " 11
Coming from a moralistic background. Creeley needed a moral justification for poetry. and Williams provided it. In a letter he reassured
Creeley that art which served in "cleansing the language of all fixations upon dead, stinking dead, usages of the past" was assisting the
state "since the gm·ernment can never be more than the government
of the words."l2 Creeley recognized in Williams his own tentativeness
with words, so e\·ident in the younger man's laconic early poems: "I
know that he did share with me a tacit fear of the well-trained, academically secure good Englzsh he felt the comfortable equipment of
"' for Creeley's discussion of this poem. see "'Craft Interview with Robert Creele\·:· m
The Craft of Poetry, ed William Packard (Garden Cit\·, :'li.Y Doubleday. 1974), pp 212-13
11 Wilham Carlos Williams, Pu:tures from Brueghel and Other Poems (!\lew York· ~ew Direcuons. 1962). p. 120. hereaftercned PB. See alsoQG. pp. 59-60.
1 ~ \\'Ilhams to Creele\·. \{arch 3. 1950. quoted m Poetu> of the Sew .1mmcan Pottl}, ed
Donald Allen and Warren Tallman (New York· Gro\'e Press. 1973), p 140 Creeley has
echoed these sentiments mam· times since, see. for example, Contexts. pp. 82-84. and QG. p
32
LYNN KELLER
373
various of his contemporaries."l3 Even Williams's attitudes toward
women were confirmation for his own.I 4
However idiosyncratic these personal identifications may be, they
constituted a crucial permission for Creeley to write the kind of
poems which were "given" him. He could not look to Olson or Pound
to dignify the presentation of intimate feelings and sexual tensions in
poetry; that was not their subject. From Creeley's perspective, one of
the greatest values of Williams's works is that they articulate a "complex and intimate and modulated quality of feeling" (Contexts, p. 81)
which Olson's more intellectual constructs do not:
I think the most significant encounter for me as a young man
trying to wnte was that found in the work of William Carlos Williams. He engaged language at a level both familiar and active to
my own senses, and made of his poems an intensely emotwnal
perception, however evident his intelligence. (QG, pp. 61-62)
Creeley has credited Williams with reassuring him "that my emotions
were not insignificant, that their articulation was really what I was
given to be involved with" (Contexts, p. 122).
That intimate and modulated emotional quality Creeley admires in
Williams's work derives in part from intraphrasal line breaks. As
Robert Duncan has pointed out, one of the most important resources
Williams offers his imitators is "the juncture that could raise the pitch
on a preposition or an article at the end of a line and increase the
stress on a noun at the return to give something like the shifts in
meaning and tone that one heard in common speech.''l5 Though
Williams is not yet Creeley's dominant prosodic model, in the more
personal, emotionally charged poems of Le Fou Creeley follows the
modernist's example of using line breaks within phrases to chart
emotionally telling pauses and shifts in intonation. Adapted to Creeley's voice, the tense pauses register moments of almost desperate
searching for appropriate words or of painful hesitation to express
what is in his mind.
13 ~·ras That a Real Poem and Other Essa~s. ed. Donald Allen (Bolinas, Calif.: Four Seasons
Foundauon,l9i9), p 102: hereafter cited WTRP
14 In his interview with Edelberg in Robert Creelry's Poetry, Creeley admits to having "used
Williams sadlv. unintentionallv, as a reassurance that mv attitudes in relation to
women .
(ound company." He adds that as he grew older he became more aware both
of Williams's "tacit hosulity" toward women and of the "complacent supenority" he himself. as a younger man, had felt toward the woman whose letters appear in Paterson By
19i5. the date of the interview, Creelev found these attitudes "offensive" (p 162)
13 "A Critical Difference ofV1ew,'' Ston~ Brook, 3i4 (1969). 362
WILLIAMS A:'\D CREELEY
374
"For Rainer Gerhardt" (FL, p. 20) is such a poem. recording Creeley·s anguish at being unable to enact a friendship in accordance with
the affection he feels. He wants to "be of use·· to Gerhardt, but the
two men "(this night)" have found communication difficult; a "petulance'' in both comes between them. The poem's hesitating movement reflects the vulnerability Creeley feels as he tentativelv reaches
out to his friend in the face of that mutual irritation:
Impossible. nghth-. to define these
conditions of
fnendship. the wandering & mexhaustible wish to
be of use, somehow
to be helpful
when u isn't simple,-wish
otherwise. convulsed. and leading
nowhere I can go.
We feel the poet groping for the exactly right words: "These
what?'' he asks himself. "The wish to what, precisely?" The answer to
the first implied question unfolds over two lines so that the word
"friendship," coming at the stressed initial position, takes on double
force; no doubts about the underlying bond remain. The words
Creeley locates to answer the second question are less satisfactory"somehow" is appended. Reading on. however. we find that the poet
has intentionally placed "somehow" in a position of syntactic ambiguity so that it can be part of the phrases both preceding and following
it. This, too. is a technique derived from Williams, e.g .. "to make a
man aware of nothing f that he knows" (CEP, p. 433). In the second
line of the second strophe, Creeley conveys the ''convulsed" wrenching of frustrated desire through twisted and broken syntax. Here
syntactic energy enforces the sense of "leading"; eager for resolution
of both the phrase and the poet's discomfort. we push on-only to
encounter the emphatic disappointment of "nowhere." Creeley's lineation. which so exactly articulates the progress of his emotions. enables us to follow and participate in the most minute shifts of feeling
accompanving the process of utterance.
During the next few years follmdng Le Fou, Creeley published se\·eral small collections in quick succession.I6 Olson remains an impor1~ Th~ Kmd of A.ct of (1953). Th~ Immoral Propos&tzon (1953),
~·erses (1954). i'ill That Is Loveh m J,fen (] 955)-\\·hose mle mav
That Is Perfect m Woman" (f949>
.1 Snarlmg Garland of Xmas
denve from Wilbams's "All
LY::\I\ KELLER
3i5
tam example, for instance in the propositional mode of "The Kind of
Act of." However, the irregular line-groupings and shifting margins
of projective layout appear with diminishing frequency, and Creeley
turns to more visually regular stanzaic forms, especially to free-verse
couplets. The chronologically arranged selection from these volumes
in The Whip (FL. pp. 26-52) reveals a progression toward more obvious and profound imitation of Williams's "machine[s] made of
words" (CLP, p. 4).
That is not to say that Creeley's poetry assumes the concrete sensuality of his model's. Being a more anxiously introspective person,
Creeley lacks Williams's ability to lose himself in the myriad objects of
a fertile world; the world he portrays is that within his consciousness.
Moreover, Creeley's poems contain few images. As Robert Pinsky has
noted, the " 'thing itself' . . . appear[s] as a kind of ghost. The
modernist reservations about ornament, and indeed about words
themselves, persist; while the image, the technique inspired by that
mistrust, is itself spurned as one more form of ornamental verbiage."I7 But while Creeley-recording every tremor of his affections,
fears, doubts-presents material that is more obviously subjective
than the people and visible objects Williams usually describes, the
younger poet is no less involved in Pound's "Direct treatment of the
'thing.' ·· Insisting that "the thing" need not be palpable matter,
Creeley has declared, "I am involved with the substance of an emotion, with a very distinct content of feeling . . . . I feel that feeling is
substantial and is literal and can be articulated .. :·(Contexts, p. 99).
An emotion, exactly depicted, is no more abstract than a woman
munching plums.
Creeley could not attain that substantiality when relying on the
thoroughly abstract and impersonal language with which he had often masked his feelings in Le Fou-e.g., "Loss exists not as perpetual
but, exact, when the attentions i are cajoled, I are flattered by their
purport or what thev purport ito attend" (Charm, p. 34). Gradually,
as he grew more comfortable presenting his immediate emotions in
poems. Creeley moved toward a more direct, conversational manner
of speaking, as in "The Whip" (1955; FL, p. 51):
I spent a night turmng in bed,
my love was a feather, a flat
I~ The Sttuatwn of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Its Tradtttons (Princeton Pnnceton Cniversitv Press, l9i6), pp. ll-12.
WILLIAMS AND CREELEY
3i6
sleeping thing. She was
verv white
and quiet, and above us on
the roof, there was another woman I
also loved ...
He was learning from Williams to use the speech that was naturally
his.
Creeley understood that in championing the "American idiom''
Williams was not simply encouraging the use of common diction in
poetry:
If one reads Williams carefully, he finds that the words are not
largely common. What is common is the mode of address, the way
of speaking thafs commonly met with in conversations. . . I
think what really was gained from that sense of source in common speech was the recognition that the intimate knowing of a
way of speaking . . . offers the kind of intensitv that poetrv
peculiarly admits. (Contexts, p. i5)
Indeed, Williams's verbs do tend to be more muscular and his modifiers more vivid than those generally used in familiar speech; and his
syntax, often accumulating modifying phrases, is far more elaborate.
Creeley's language is comparably un-"common·· in that, while his vocabulary is much sparer and his syntax simpler than Williams's, he
continues throughout his career to use abstract and academic terms
that rarely a!"'pear in casual talk. Yet by cultivating his sensitivity to
the cadences of the vernacular and by mixing colloquial phrases with
his more disembodied ones, Creeley. too, learned to create a more
pervasive effect of common idiom than his diction might seem to
warrant.
Strategic uses of banal colloquial expressions lend an idiomatic
character to the poems of both Williams and the maturing Creeley:
WILLI.-nts:
In a case like this I know
quick action IS the main thing.
(CLP. p. 5i)
That's what you get out of
it. But put It down in vour memory that this
IS the kind of stuff that they can't get away
with
(CEP. p. 31 i>
LY!\i!'; KELLER
CREELEY:
37i
. . . And
why not, I thought to
myself, why
not.
(FL, p. 50)
. Were
proud? Of what? To buy
a thing like that.
(FL, p. 41)
Because vernacular terms imply an informal context and an unpretentious attitude, they also help create an impression of sincerity and
frankness that is essential to the appeal of both poets' work. Williams
is prominent among those from whom Greeley learned that "To borrow the language of other times and places when it is not intimate is
to risk faking .. ."(Contexts, p. 93). Hence:
WILLIA~fs:
I, a writer. at one time hipped on
painting, did not consider. . . .
(CLP, p. 99)
I make really very little money.
What of it?
(CEP, p. 311)
CREELEY:
I would tear up all the checks
made out to me,
not giving a good goddamn
what the hell happened.
(FL, p. 48)
A poem that begins with a discursive confession may achieve a comparable effect of confidentiality or intimacy:
WILLIAMS:
Sometimes I envy others, fear them
a little too, if they write well.
(CLP, p. 23)
CREELEY:
When I know what people think of me
I am plunged into my loneliness.
(FL, p. 39)
By relying more on flat prosaic statement than on lyrical eloquence,
both poets attain a distinct and familiar voice, not distanced by the
lofty formality of the "poetic."
In addition to helping establish their personal voices, the vernacu-
WILLIAMS A!\D CREELEY
378
lar proved useful to Williams and Creeley in creating poems that
were "pruned to a perfect economy'' (CLP, p. 4). Williams's work
showed Creeley that a few lines of dialogue can convey a dramatic
situation as fully as a descriptive explication, and with far more Immediacy and compression. For example, in the following lines Williams registers not only the nature of his patient's complaint but also
her tone of defiance defensively covering embarrassment: "-Wore
my bathing suit! wet I four hours after sundown. f That's how·· (CEP.
p. 309). Similarly, bottled-up anger, condescension, and flirtation are
all captured in Creeley's "'She says, I if I thought it would get any
better I II would shoot you, you i nut, you"" (FL, p. 49).
Williams, believing that all verse "must be governed by some measure,"l8 used the pronounced rhythms of vernacular utterance to create rhythmical patterns in his nonmetrical verse. Creeley does the
same. but more often than Williams he plays the marked rhythms of
speech against the beats imposed by his lineation. Thus, without depending on a background of regular syllable-stress meter. he creates
something comparable to counterpoint in a metrical poem; the interplay is between the expected phrasal rhythm determined by syntax
and the line as a rhythmic unit.
In Creeley·s best idiomatic poems this rhythmic tension is emotionally expressive. For example. most of the line breaks in "I Know a
Man·· (FL, p. 38). coming mid-phrase. create hesitations one would
not find in relaxed conversation:
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,-John. I
sd, whiCh was not his
name. the darkness surrounds us. what
can we do agamst
it. . .
Because of the asyntactic line breaks, the first syllable of each line
receives extra emphasis. The crowding of stresses and the unnatural
pauses communicate both the speaker's anxious restraint and his
need for release, well before he mentions the threatening darkness
or the car in which he might escape it. The unexpected break in "the
darkness sur- I rounds us"-sounding as if the speaker were almost
1
~
Selected Essa_u of\"illlzam Carlos ~l.:tlltams (1\ew York: Random House, 1954). p 339
LY~N
KELLER
3i9
suffocating or breathless with fear and forced to inhale mid-wordconveys his heightened panic. When the speaker hits upon a possible
solution, the poem's rhythms reflect his momentary confidence and
sense of liberation; "buy a goddamn big car" is the poem's only
phrase of any length which flows unimpeded. In ''John'"s cautioning
rejoinder, Creeley returns to mid-phrase junctures which interrupt
ordinary speech rhythms. The abrupt, heavy stresses of this lineation
register the urgency of ''John"'s warning-"for I christ's sake, look I
out where yr going."
By the late fifties, when he was composing the poems in A Form of
Women (1959; part 2 of For Love), Creeley had established his own
distinctive blend of colloquial and flatly abstract diction and had
learned to manipulate the rhythmic possibilities of the vernacular. At
the same time, he had settled into a characteristic mode which, as
Duncan has pointed out, is one defined by Williams: "the commonspeech song with a persisting convention of two, three, or four line
stanzas, highly articulated to provide close interplay and variation."19
That deft articulation involves manipulating not only the speech patterns and line junctures we have already examined, but also the
broad range of sound patterns Creeley includes within the category
of "rhyme." He considers rhyme to be any "recurrence of a sound
sufficiently similar to one preceding it to catch in the ear and mind as
being the 'same' " (WTRP, p. 68)-a definition that encompasses not
only conventional end-rhymes and internal rhyme, but also word
repetition, alliteration, assonance, parallel syntactic structures, and
echoing cadences. Like Williams, Creeley relies on such sound patterns to give to his free verse the shapeliness which end-rhymes and
regular stresses provide in traditional metrical forms. Having assimilated Williams's notion that any formal characteristic of a poem must
be "an essential of the work, one of its words,"20 Creeley believes that
the modifications and modulations of sound "[can] carry the emotional content of the poem as ably as anything 'said' "(Contexts, p. 76).
"A Form of Women" (FL, pp. 56-57) can illustrate how Creeley, by
arranging his words and phrases so that they echo and recall one another, weaves into his prosody both an organizing pattern and an expressive melody. Some of the techniques he uses are obvious and
simple-occasional end-rhymes, frequent repetitions of end-words,
pounding recurrence of key monosyllabic nouns and verbs (face,
hands, moon, know, fear, touch. love, see). Others are more sophistiI9
20
'"After For Love," boundary 2, 6, no. 3-7, no. I (Spring/Fall1978), 234.
William Carlos Williams.lmllgznatzons (New York: New Directions. 1970). p l02.
WILLIAMS AND GREELEY
380
cated and subtle. For example, in the first stanza Creeley presents
four consecutive instances of an iamb following an anapest:
I have come far enough
from where I was n~t ~f~re
to _ha~e ~~en_ t~e thi~s
_, _ ,
looking mat me through the open door.
To prevent this regularity from being tedious, he precedes the first
of these with an additional iamb, "from where,'" and eliminates the
pause of the line juncture between the last two. At the same time. he
provides additional coherence by repeating the f-sound m "far.··
"enough," "from,'' and "before,.. and by reinforcing the end-rhyme
"before/door·· with the slant rhymes of "far" and "where.··
The first line of the next stanza repeats the same anapest-iamb pattern-"and have walked tonight'"-but then that is abandoned and
Creeley turns instead to alliteration, consonance, and assonance: "by
myself I to see the moonlight I and see it as trees.·· Assonance operates not only within single stanzas, but as a means of linking stanzas
to one another. For example, the long o which occurs twice in the
repeated "know" of the third stanza reappears in the first line of the
next: "~fy face is my own, I thought." Creeley later adopts "My-is my own" as the pattern for the seventh stanza and, using a less
elememary technique. echoes the close of the fifth stanza, "but could
not,'" in the line that breaks that pattern. "but I am not." In the following stanza, the eighth, the long o of "own·· recurs for the last time.
in the end-word "alone.·· The sound similarity between these two
words reinforces the link between selfhood and isolation that is the
thematic center of the poem.
The first twelve lines compose a single sentence-unusually long
for Creeley-and the lines break between phrases and clauses. Because no junctures occur within phrases until the eighteenth line, the
unexpectedness of an intraphrasal break heightens its expressive
power:
could not touch you.
wanted verv much to
touch you
but could nor.
I
I
Without verse lineation these two sentences would sound flat. But
LYK.!\' KELLER
381
Creeley's arrangement, which brings out the rhyme and trochaic pattern linking "touch you" I "much to" I "touch you," effectively underlines the intensity of his desire to make contact. Even more resonant
is the aching pause after "to," which makes audible the poet's painful
constraint; the depth of his emotion sounds in his voice breaking.
Creeley could have discovered virtually all the "rhyming" techniques of "A Form of Women" in Williams's poetry, for example in
the opening of"Burning the Christmas Greens" (CLP, p. 16):
Their time past, pulled down
cracked and flung to the fire
-go up in a roar
All recognition lost, burnt clean
clean in the flame, the green
dispersed. a living red,
flame red, red as blood wakes
on the ashand ebbs to a steady burning
the rekindled bed become
a landscape of flame
Williams repeats the monosyllabic words "clean," "flame," "red" (in
his more adjectival and less verbal style, the repeated words are adjectives and nouns, not verbs). While he uses more alliteration than
Creeley, the two men play upon the melodies of their vowels in much
the same way. Here the a of"past" recurs in "cracked" and "ash," the
a of "flame" in "wakes," both a's in "landscape," the e of "clean" in
"green," thee of "red" in the rhyming "bed" as well as in "ebbs'' and
"steady.'' Spondaic patterns recur throughout-"pulled down,"
"burnt clean," "flame red." The phrases "flung to the fire," "up in a
roar" and "clean in the flame," near syntactic parallels, provide additional rhythmic patterning. These repetitions do more than lend formal coherence; since the theme of Williams's poem is the interdependence of destruction and creation, many of the connections
established by sound-for example, between "flame" and "wakes" or
"clean" (from the fire) and "green" -reinforce the poem's sense.
Like most successful free-verse poets, Williams and Creeley establish only enough aural patterning to create what Barbara Herrnstein
Smith terms a "limit of variability"21 within which their irregularities
21
Pol!tzc Closure· .4. Study of How Poems End (Chicago. L'niverslty of Chicago Press. 1968),
p 86
\HLLIAMS AND CREELEY
382
can be effective. Thus, in Williams's poems of the thirties and forties-those with the greatest impact on Creeley's prosody-the number of syllables and stresses in the lines of a given poem usually varies
within a narrow range. These lines tend to be brief so that individual
words and syllables gain weight and definition. Yet because such
short lines could easilv result in a monotonous pounding of unrelie,·ed stresses. Williams and Creeley vary their rhythms. Sometimes
they do so by altering the lineation of successive syntactic parallels or
of recurrent phrases; sometimes they add a syllable or two so that the
pattern is slightly modified. They amid consistently ending their
lmes on either a rising or falling cadence; this ,·aries the tempo since
a reader tends to mm·e on more rapidlv to the next line after one
ending on an upbeat.
Their skill at achieving such ,·ariety is perhaps best demonstrated
when we examine poems in which repetition IS particularly prominent. Here is \Villiams·s "To a Poor Old \\'oman"":
munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
Thev taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her
You can see it b,the wav she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
Comforted
a solace of npe plums
seeming to fill the air
The,· taste good to her22
The closing lines of the first and third stanzas parallel one another in
sharing the same number of syllables and the same final three words.
but the initial iamb of the former and the spondee of the latter distinguish their cadences. Similarly, "good to her" and "Comforted" narrowly avoid exact mirroring because three words demand more distinct articulation than three syllables of a single word. Although
""Collected Eari1er Poems of ~\-tlham Carios n·!lbmu>. p 99 CopvnghL 1938 b' :\'ew D•rerllon• Pubhshmg Corporation Reprmted b,- permiSSIOn of ~ew D1recuons
LY!\~
KELLER
383
"seeming to fill" (which echoes "munching a plum") seems about to
repeat the accentual pattern of "solace of ripe plums," Williams replaces the single accented syllable "plums" with the iambic phrase
"the air."
Of course, the most obvious repetition in the poem is the restatement of "They taste good to her." By shifting his line breaks, Williams significantly alters the cadence and thus the semantic emphasis.
Denise Levertov has noted that "we have first the general recognition
of well-being, then the intensification of that sensation, then its voluptuous location in the sense of taste. And all this is presented
through indicated pitches, that is, by melody, not by rhythm alone."23
Creeley uses markedly similar techniques in "Goodbye":
She stood at the window. There was
a sound, a light.
She stood at the window. A face.
Was it that she was looking for.
he thought. Was it that
she was looking for. He said.
turn from it, turn
from it. The pain is
not unpainful. Turn from it.
The act of her anger, of
the anger she felt then,
not turning to him.24
Repetition could hardly be more insistent (and at times Creeley does
carry it too far: we could do without tautologies like "The pain is I not
unpainful"). Because the verbal material is so minimal, the slight
shifts in pitch and emphasis become the poem's most significant
means of expression.
The third line is not rhythmically or melodically identical to the
first because "A face'' (followed by a period) is a complete statement-what she sees reflected in the window-while "There was" is
a fragment leading us more quickly to the following line. In the second stanza Creeley repeats a sentence much as Williams did above,
first stating it as a complete unit, then shifting the emphasis with a
different line juncture. By raising the pitch on "that," Creeley con"On the Funelion of the Line." ChzR. 30, no. 3 (Wimer l9i9l, 33-34.
By permission of Charles Scribner's Sons from For Love. Poems 1950-1960, p. 63: copyright© 1962 Robert Creeley.
23
24
384
WILLIAMS AND CREELEY
veys the intensity with which the man tries to probe the woman's
thoughts, hinting of despair or anger as well as bewilderment.
Though "he thought" and "He said" are parallel in syntax and follow
the same statement, they receive different intonation because "said"
comes at the end of a line and leads into the words following it. The
repetition of "turn from it'' enacts the insistence of the man's desire:
the emphasis on "turn'' in the second statement stresses the importance of that action, so that in the poem's concluding line the reader
feels the full significance of the woman's refusal to perform it.
In Williams's manipulation of syntax Creeley discowred additional
ways free-verse forms could serve as "an extension of content. " 25 \Villiams. who was constantly concerned with awakening his readers to
the vital energy in the things he depicted, characteristically used svntax as what Hugh Kenner has termed a "suspension system." 26 His
short poems. for example, are often a single sentence in which the
verb is deferred while details accumulate in modifying phrases; consequentlv. "we are drawn past unit after unit of attention by the
promise of a verb. . . ."2 7 Though the poet must momentarilv arrest
his subject from the Aux. the energy he gains from playing upon
grammatical expectations parallels that which infuses the object he
obsen·es. As Kenner has pointed out. \Villiams creates patterns of
syntax analogous to the inherent energy of his subject (The Pound
Era, p. 400). Creeley often does the same. For example. in the closing
lines of "'Goodbye:· Creeley could have smoothed out his svntax to
indicate first that she did not turn and then to explain that this resulted from her anger. Had he done so. the poem's force would ha,·e
dissipated anticlimactically. since we would ha,·e witnessed the cruoal
act before the poem's end. The last line would haYe lacked the ring of
finality which convinces us that this is indeed a moment of decisive
schism, a real "goodbye:·
Similarlv, in the closing stanza of "The Door" (FL, p. 103) Creelev
uses syntax to enact the tensions within the events he renders. Here
the two prepositional phrases "before me across the floor·· create a
sense of reaching forward so that the word ·'beckon" confirms an impulse \'\·e are already experiencing:
2o "ProJectl\·e Verse:· Selected n:ntmgs of Charles Olson. ed. Robert Creele~- (l\;e"· York.
Ne"' Directwns. 1966). p. 16. Olson Identifies Creele' as the ongmator ofthe phrase.
! 6 A. Homemade World The .1mencanA1odermst Wnters c:o.;ew York Alfred A Knopf. 1975>.
p 59
r Hugh Kenner. The Pound Era !Berkelev L"nn·ersm· ofCaliforma Press. 1971). p 402
LY~K
KELLER
385
In my mind I see the door,
I see the sunlight before me across the floor
beckon to me, as the Lady's skirt
moves small beyond it.
In the last line, the separation of the verb and the adverbial phrase by
the adjective "small" creates a syntactic analogue to the aching distance the poet feels between himself and the muse he pursues.
By the time Creeley was writing the last poems included in For
Love, he had received a letter from Williams acknowledging how well
the younger poet had learned the fundamental lessons of his master.
The letter, dated January 18, 1960, begins with remarks upon the
importance of "appreciation of the measure" -a measure founded
on "the local idiom and the variable foot." Williams complains of the
apparent deafness of most contemporary poets, but adds:
I don't know why I go on in this way because of all people writing
about you need it the least. You have the subtlest feeling for the
measure that I encounter anywhere except in the verses of Ezra
Pound whom I cannot equal. At your best, rarely, you perhaps
surpass me with a passage that leaves me flat on my back but
there is never much of that. As you vourself say it is mostly unconscious when something of that sort appears on the page.2B
The grudging tone here only underlines the authenticity of the tribute; its author, after all, had publicly admitted years before, in lines I
have already quoted, "Sometimes I envy others, fear them I a little
too, if they write well" (CLP, p. 23).
At the bottom of the same letter is a postscript, "THE ROSE is
good." It is no wonder that Williams approved of that poem, since it
provides such clear evidence of all that Creeley had assimilated from
him in the first decade of his career. A brief description of "The
Rose" (FL, pp. 148-49) summarizes the essential continuities between
the two poets. Like Williams's lyrics, this poem proceeds from immediate, particular, and commonplace events: two lovers are in a room;
28 Williams to Creeley,January 18. 1960 Copyright© 1981 bv the Estate of Florence H.
Williams. Used by permission of ~ew Directions Publishing Corporation. agents for William E and Paul H. Williams. Vsed also by permiss1on of Robert Creeley and Washington
Untversnv Libranes The letter 1s contained in The Robert Creeley Papers, Modem Literature Collection, Washm~ton t:niversitv Libraries. St. Louis. Much of the material quoted
here was first published m ~fariant
386
WILLIAMS
A~D
CREELEY
the woman feels restless, goes for a walk; the man follows and is able
to soothe her, reestablishing the closeness between them. l'\o great
truths are proclaimed or generalizations offered; instead. the poem's
universality derives from careful recording of individual experience.
Following Williams's advice, Creeley makes his poem from "words
as he finds them interrelated about him'' and favors denotative over
symbolic usage. Thus, while the rose has been a central symbol in
lO\·e poetry for centuries. Creeley's focus is on the literal Rowers that
Bobbie grows. In its heterogeneity, his diction is comparable to Williams's; Creeley's predominantly simple and prosaic language gains
texture and interest from a sprinkling of formal terms ("monstrous.··
"discloses'') and from occasional surprising turns of phrase (''a mowment! quietly misled," "a cloud had I broken at last I open").
Following \\'illiams's example, Creeley adjusts his svntax, line JUnctures. rhythms, and pace to accord with the most minute changes in
emotional context. The straining pauses and abrupt sentences of the
opening stanzas enact the tension between the lovers, while the
poem's resolution sounds in wavelike repetitions of gradually unfolding svntax. Line breaks occur within phrases when the poet reaches
most tentatively and painstakingly toward understanding of the
evolving situation: "There roses, here roses. ! Rowers, a pose of i nature. her! nature has disclosed to him." Creelev·s enJambments. like
the modernist's, capitalize on the directed energy inherent in syntax:
at the same time. the short lines and frequent stresses created by his
junctures slow the momentum enough to highlight the boundaries of
each word, each emotional nuance.
What distinguishes "The Rose" from most of the poems in For Love
is Its slightly more relaxed cadence, and this too can be traced to Williams. In "A Character for Love, .. his 1954 review of Williams's The
Desert A·Iuszc, Creeley had written, ''What the poem is-beyond his
sense of this service as 'capsule for punishable secrets' or including
It-comes again and again to the fact of women" (QG, pp. 113-14).
Creeley identified the force behind Williams's work as a "hamrnenng
at the final edge of contact'' <QG, p. 113) with the female principle.
This persistent hammering is perhaps even more characteristic of
Creeley than of Williams. but in the last poems of For Lol'e it assumes
a new form very close to the modernist's. \Vith the bitterness of his
first unhappy marriage behind him and the possibilities of fulfilling
love and contact renewed in his marriage to Bobbie Hawkins, Creele\· gained access to the mellower cadences of \VilJiams's late love In-
LYl'\X KELLER
38i
ics. Thus, the halting grace of Williams's tercets in "Asphodel, That
Greeny Flower'" echoes in "The Rose":
You understand
I had to meet you
after the event
and have still to meet you.
Love
to which you too shall bow
along with mea flower
a weakest flower
(PB, p. 161)
shall be our trust
And as if,
as if a cloud had
broken at last
open
and all the rain
from that,
from that had fallen
on them,
on them there is a mark
of her nature, her flowers.
and his room, his nature,
to come home to.
(FL, p. 149)
This is not to deny the differences between the two passages: Creeley's repetitions still seem to stutter when placed next to Williams's,
his lines progress more cautiously than the modernist's, and his work
remains more context-bound. l'ionetheless, we hear in Creeley's writing a lessening of constraint which he commented upon in 1961:
"Now, as I begin to relax, as I not so much grow older, but more
settled, more at ease in my world, the line can not so much grow
softer, but can become . . . more lyrical, less afraid of concluding"
(Contexts, p. i). It is Williams's line that provides Creeley's model as
he reaches toward a more relaxed and confident lyricism.
In Creeley's second major volume, Words (196i), his prosodic debt
to Williams remains as strong as before, but it is dear that the imitative phase of his career is over. In a 1965 interview he explained:
WILLIA\fS AND CREELE't
388
[Imnanon] IS the way one learns, by having the intimate possibility of some master like Williams or Pound. Writmg poems in
those modes was a great instruction to me insofar as I began to
"feel.. what Williams was doing as well as ·'understand"' it. And so
I found possibilitv for my own acts. (Contexts, p. 124)
Thus, this volume's poem "For W. C. W.''2 9 takes as its subject poetic
devices Creeley originally learned from Williams. but which the
younger poet has further developed until they are unmistakably his
own. It was Williams who taught Creelev that any "repeated i insistence'"-related ideas, parallel constructions. recurrent sounds, or repeated words-constitutes "rhyme ... He also showed Creeley the effectiveness of tiny variations ""·ithin this patterning. But because
Creeley's style is more reductive-images less frequent. lines shorter,
words fewer-such manipulation has come to be more central to his
poetry than to Williams's. In "For W. C. w:· Creeley points to the
important semantic differences determined by whether or not the
"and" between two "there"' ·s comes at the end of a line, or whether a
phrase like "I want"' is followed bv a dash or a period. He pays tribute
to the modernist for having led him to these discoveries. but feels no
need to imitate Williams as he had done, for example. when he
modeled "Wait for ~1e .. (1954: FL, p. 43) on the older poet"s 'The
Testament of Perpetual Change" (CLP. p. 103).
Creelev·s thematic concerns in Words haw shifted somewhat from
those of For Love, bringing into focus interests of \Villiams's which
were not so essential to Creeley earlier. Among these new preoccupations is a reaction against mind/body dualism:
I wanted to get out of that awful assumption that thinking is the
world. . . [It wasn't] until the sixties that people [began] to. as
Allen Ginsberg would say. come back into the experience of their
own bodies as primarv. and to realize that the mind IS physiological. . . . I was thmking of that sense of Williams· of the interest
m the mind and body as one (Contexts. pp. l66-6i}
Some of the poems in lrords direcdv express Creeley's desire for release from the mind's dominance:
T omght let me go
at last out of whate,·er
zu
~-ronis (~ew
York. Charles Scnbner·~ Sons. 1967). p 27
389
LYNN KELLER
mind I thought to have,
and all the habits of it.
(p. 23)
There is nothing
but what thinking makes
it less tangible. The mind,
fast as it goes, loses
pace, puts in place of it
like rocks simple markers,
for a way only to
hopefully come back to
where it cannot.
(p. 52)
In addition, Creeley's descriptions take on a new physicality which
brings to his work more of the muscular and sensuous force of Williams's. The younger poet strives especially to lend concreteness to
concepts generally considered abstractions. For example, in "The
Window" he discusses "Position" and "How I heavv the slow II world
is with I everything put I in place," translating his responses into entirely physiological terms: "My II face is heavy I with the sight. I can I
feel my eye breaking" (p. 38). Even more graphic is his grotesque
literalizing of the expression "to catch someone's eye":
I
With a quick
jump he caught
the edge of
hereyeand
it tore, down,
ripping.
(p. 40)
The following depiction of emotional vulnerability is equally visceral:
. . . It
hurts,
to live
like this,
meat
sliced
walking.
(p. 104)
In Words Creeley gives more attention to the tangible details of his
surroundings; for example,
WILLIAMS AND CREELEY
390
This time not changed.
but the way of feeling
secured by walls and books,
a picture hanging down.
a center shifted, dust
on all he puts his hand on,
disorder, papers and letters
and accumulations of clothing,
and bedclothes, and under his
feet the rug bunches. (p. 59)
Such concreteness brings an echo of Williams's "Fine Work with
Pitch and Copper" (CEP, p. 368) to "For Helen":
a huge encrusted
sense of grooved trunk,
I can
slide my finger along
each edge. (p. 80)
For the first time, the women Creeley writes about become particular
physical presences:
Always your
tits, not breasts, but
harsh sudden rises
of impatient flesh
(p. 46)
. . . Squatting, her
head reflected in the mirror,
the hair dark there, the
full of her face, the shoulders.
sat spread-legged, turned on
one faucet and shyly pissed.
(p. 35)
Somewhat paradoxically, Creeley's efforts to unite thought and
sensation seem to have increased his consciousness of the void within
and around him. Words, objects formed by the teeth, tongue, mouth.
and breath, become things with which one fiHs that emptiness:
then what
is emptiness
LYNN KELLER
391
for. To
fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full
of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.
(p. 3i)
The sexual act is analogous-the filling of a hole-and several
poems in Words slide between the act of speech and that of sexual
penetration, blurring the distinction between them. "The Hole," for
instance, begins, "There is I a silence I to fill" (p. 106) and moves
quickly to thoughts of an ass hole filled with toilet paper and a vagina
stuffed with a coke bottle. Fantasies of penises and pleasure lead to "I
want I to, now I I can't wait any I longer" (p. 108). This seems an
expression of sexual craving, but the lines immediately following reveal that the longing is equally for language: "Talk II to me, fill I emptiness with I you, empty I hole" (p. 108).
Neither sex nor words, however urgently desired, truly fill the
void; in fact, they bring it closer. In "The Pattern" Creeley presents
verbalizing as a ludicrous act by which one invents a self that might
otherwise prove nonexistent-"! II speak to I hear myself I speak?"
(p. 49). In "A Sight" sex is a descent into a vacuum; a woman's caress
in bed gives him "the feeling of I falling into no II matter. . . . The
sudden I thing of being I no one" (pp. 101-2). Similarly, Creeley describes the experience of orgasm as a loss of contact with the sensory
world; his own cry is a
roaring unheard,
like stark sight
sees itself
inverted
into dark
turned. (p. 48)
The "sexual shock" makes Creeley aware that the mind's confines define him; when released from individual consciousness, he finds himself nowhere, threatened with nonexistence.
In Williams's work there is no such void. His erotic approach to the
WILLIAMS AND CREELEY
392
\\·orld enables him to merge with and possess it; when his personality
is obliterated in overpowering emotion or sensation, his mind adheres to external things. For Williams neither words, nor people. nor
objects fill a void; rather, they are forms whose common source is the
earth. That ground is formless, chaotic. but teeming and fertilenever vacuous.30 Despite his proclamation that "Only the imagination is real!" (PB, p. 1i9), Williams was nothing of a solipsist. As Kenner has said, for Williams "The given world is there. It is neither a
blank for our talk to fill, an amorphism for our words to shape. nor a
disappointment for 'noble imagery' to transfigure·· (Ho-memade W or/.d,
p. 65). Williams himself stated, "Nature is the hint to composition . . . because it possesses the quality of independent existence.
of reality which we feel in ourselves·· (lmagznatro-ns, p. 121 ). The imagination provides witness to the richness of the present moment: 'The
only means [one] has to give value to life is to recognize it with the
imagination and name it . . . " (lmagmatwns, p. 115).
In contrast, Creeley has an increasingly tenuous sense of things existing outside the mind that names them. Rather than recognizing
the world, the self perhaps creates it: "for me it zs true that this complex piece of meat, me, is factually the author of that 'world' the also
present T has as experience·· (WTRP, p. 130). At times Creeley·s assumption that the mind creates the world is a source of terror and
loneliness, but it also enhances "the delight of thought as a possibilitv
of forms" (Co-ntexts, p. 169). He gives the title "Joy" to a poem in
which he celebrates the "infinite emptiness" of the world previous to
the mind's engagement, declaring, "I could look at fan empty hole
for hours i thinking it will I get something in it'' (Words, p. 113).
Though Creeley has always been a poet of "logopoeia-head trips"
(Craft of Poetry, p. 211), his later poems demonstrate an increasing
fascination with the process of thought. In them he explores not onh·
how the thinking process locates a person in the world, but also how
it locates the world within the individual. Creeley's poetry is evolving
in directions far more epistemological-and more solipsistic-than
Williams's poetry did.
Creeley's movement toward philosophic solipsism has important
consequences for his poetic forms. If words are one's only means of
reification, their substantiality must be reinforced as much as possible. Hence. Creeley's lines contract still further until they are often
J
30 See
l'nn·ersn~-
Hdhs \hiler. Poets of Realzty Su: Twentzeth-Century Wnters (Cambndge: Hanard
Press. 1965). pp. 328-33
LYNN KELLER
393
only two to four syllables long. This forces us to pause over and savor
each syllable, and also to feel the tangible weight of the silences between them. Moreover, Creeley's belief that we live largely within the
world our words create compels him to give verbal form to as much
of his daily experience as possible. He therefore began deliberately to
loosen his writing habits, trying to be more "open to the casual, the
commonplace" (WTRP, p. 104), to approach poetry as a "tracking
process as opposed to a record of distilled thoughts,"3 1 and "to avoid
any immediate decision as to whether or not the effects of such writing were 'good' ''(Contexts, p. 41). Creeley was particularly pleased by
those poems toward the end of Words, such as "A Piece" ("One and I
one, two, I three" [p. 115]) and "The Farm" ("Tips of celery, I clouds
of II grass-one I day I'll go away" [p. 120]),32 which opened for him
"the possibility of scribbling, of writing for the immediacy of the pleasure and without having to pay attention to some final code of significance" (Contexts, p. 42).
Creeley inherited from Williams a dual desire-for spontaneity
and for precision.33 In Williams's work the urge to define was predominant since the poet had always to resist the pull toward formlessness exerted by the "unfathomable ground" (CLP, p. 23). In
Creeley's later works, immediacy begins to take precedence over formal definition, since he is threatened not by formless chaos but by a
silent void.
Creeley's commitment to improvisation has, in the long run,
proved detrimental to his art. In the volumes following Words he explores increasingly casual journallike formats, jotting down random
thoughts, transcribing bits of conversation, recording all the banalities of his mundane existence. As his concern with monitoring artistic
quality diminishes, Creeley's line breaks become more haphazard or
automatic than expressive, his figures become increasingly hackneyed, and his formulations slip toward the truistic and cliche. The
conceptual framework behind Creeley's experiments-a commitment to keeping art directly responsive to life in progress, a desire to
1 1 .. How
He Knows When to Stop: Creeley on Closure .. (interview With Terrv R. Bacon),
APR, 5, no. 6 (:-.;ovember/December 1976), 6.
32 Permission to quote these two complete poems (which end With penods m the original
text) has been granted by the L'niversity of Califorma Press and Robert Creeley
33 In summarizing the character of Williams's mind, Mike Weaver has said that "two
tendencies, Improvisatory and precisionist. rubbed ceaselessly against each other" ( Wrllaam
Carlos Wrllaams: The .4mencan Baclr.ground [Cambndge: Cambridge University Press. 1971),
p 162).
394
WILLIAMS A?\D CREELEY
accept and include even the drab, the chance, the incoherent-mav
sustain his readers' interest for a while. But his relentless presentation of trivial events in the plainest possible terms-"Sitting at
table- ! good talk ! with good people''34-eventually grows wearisome.
Ironically, Creeley's artistic decline is due as much to his excessively strict allegiance to certain of the modernist principles he first
encountered in Williams as to his solipsistic orientation. As Pinsky
has noted, Creeley has carried the modernist reservation about ornament to such extremes that his idiom seems "worn down rather than
sculpted'' (p. 12). In addition. Creeley has extended the self-conscious, reflexive character of modernist writing to the point where he
has lost sight of art"s public communicative function and of the artist"s responsibility to keep his audience engaged.
Creeley's best poetrv to date is that which remains closest to Wilhams·s manner-his work of the fifties and early sixties. By imitating
the example of Williams's highly personal subject matter and by
adapting the prosodic techniques with which the older poet ga,·e It
authenticity, Creeley created such eloquent common-speech lyrics as
"The Lover.'' "A Song:· "The Rain ... "The Operation," "Something."
"The Business, .. ·The World." "The First Time:· "The Whip." ··1
Know a ~[an,'" and ''Words."' Disappointment m Creeley's recent
work need not diminish our pleasure in the accuracy with which he
records his deepest. and often most anguished. hesitations and
yearnings in his early love poems; nor need it detract from our appreciation of the special dignity within awkwardness he attains m
these intimate revelations.
Cmverszty ofWzsconszn. J-ladzson
14 Th1s is a complete poem m Creeley"s Hello :4jounUll. FebruaT'i 29-.'vfa} 3, 1976 (:\ew
York. :\ew D1recuons, 1978). p 12. Copynght © 1978 b" Robert Creele•·- Reprmted b,
perm1ss1on of ::\"ew D•recuons Publishmg Corporauon