Robert Creeley (May 21 1926 – March 30 2005) was a prolific poet often associated with the Black Mountain poets (Charles Olsen, Larry Eigner, Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, Paul Blackburn, Hilda Morley, John Wieners, Joel Oppenheimer, Denise Levertov, and Jonathan Williams) but his style didn’t really conform with the other Black Mountain poets.

Creeley is a notoriously difficult poet to understand because he typically made innovations in his style (and in poetry) with each successive book of poems he published. Thus, understanding Creeley immediately is almost impossible, even if you’re familiar with his work. Critics have noted that his changes in style were innovative but always subtle, which is one of the main reasons he is so difficult to immediately appreciate. From one set of poems to the next, the poetry might appear the same, but the analysis used to find the beauty and wit in the first set often wouldn’t apply to the next set.

Perhaps the most important thing about Creeley was the effort he made to teach younger poets. In the modern age, there are both benefits and detriments to being a poet, and Creeley made major steps towards eliminating the detriments (e.g. the kind of relationship that existed between Wordsworth and Coleridge is extremely unlikely to ever exist again because of the broadness of the modern age). Creeley purposefully sought out poets he thought had potential and founded a Poetics Program at The State University of New York at Buffalo. He also taught poetry at numerous locations, including Brown.