Robert Creeley, 78, Modernist Poet
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Robert Creeley, who died yesterday at age 78, was a non-metrical poet who emerged from the jazz-tinged Beat sensibilities of the 1950s and established a distinctive and much-imitated style.
Creeley died of pneumonia while on a two-month residency at the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, Tex., according to Brown University, which announced the death. Creeley joined the Brown faculty as a distinguished professor in 1978.
Born in Arlington, Mass., Creeley attended Harvard, taking time off during World War II to drive an ambulance in India. While attempting to earn a living by raising pigeons on Martha’s Vinyard in the late 1940s, Creeley began publishing poems, and corresponding with established poets including William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson. He later edited the Black Mountain Review. In 1960, he published “For Love,” a collection of poems that established his reputation.
Creeley held various academic appointments, and was associated with SUNY Buffalo beginning in 1966. He was named poet laureate of New York State in 1992.
He won the 1999 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. He also won the Shelley Award, the Frost Medal, and was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, in 1988.
