A MEMBER of the Black Mountain poets who flourished in the 1950s and 1960s, Robert Creeley was perhaps more influential than any of his contemporaries on the generation of poets which was finding its voice in the following decade. Indeed, since the publication of his collection For Love: Poems 1950-1960 in 1962, Creeley had been regarded as one of America’s leading poets.

Yet his reputation in America did not at all resemble that of such earlier compatriots as Robert Frost, or nearer contemporaries such as Richard Wilbur, who wrote in a recognisable tradition. It was rather that of a poet who was noted for performing his own work. “I write to move in words, a human delight” was his credo. Thus, his work was less speculative than that of such other Black Mountain poets as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn and Denise Levertov. Sometimes his poetry lacked their control: it was always totally uncompromising. But at its best it addressed the reader with a sense of excitement and of concrete reality.

Robert White Creeley was born at Arlington, Massachusetts, the son of a physician, who died when he was 4. By that time Creeley had lost the sight of one eye in a road accident. He always resolutely refused to wear a patch to conceal this disability, which is celebrated in a painting by Jim Dine.

Creeley was educated at Holderness School, Plymouth, New Hampshire. Then he attended Harvard University for a year (1943-44) before joining the American Field Service, with which he saw active service as an ambulance driver in India and Burma. He returned to Harvard for a year (1945-46), but, upon his marriage to Ann MacKinnon in 1946, he left without taking a degree.

He and his new wife, with whom he had two sons and a daughter, tried their hands at farming near Littleton, New Hampshire, for the three years 1948-51, but met with scant success — and lost their capital.

They then went to France and lived in Provence, at Lambesc, Bouches du Rhône, where they had as near neighbours the English-turned-American poet Denise Levertov and her husband the novelist Mitchell Goodman. Creeley’s first book of poems, Le Fou, appeared from a small Ohio press in 1952. Poems were also appearing regularly in such little magazines as Origin.

In the summer of 1953 he and his family moved to Majorca. Their 18-month sojourn there gave him the background for his only novel, The Island, although this was not published until 1963.

The Island is essentially an impressionistic autobiography rather than a novel, for the element of invention in it is minimal. It gives a stark, painfully honest, though often comic account of Creeley’s very difficult first marriage, which ended in sheer incompatibility and divorce in 1956.

It was much discussed in America, but attracted little attention in Britain at the time. However, it is likely that The Island will be the work — together with the earlier poems and some short stories — that British literary critics will find most interesting whenever Creeley’s work comes to be considered here.

By the time The Island was published Creeley’s reputation had been made. He had also married again, in 1957. His second wife was Bobby Louise Hall, by whom he had two daughters. This marriage, too, ended in divorce, in 1976. By that time the works he published at the Divers Press, which he had founded and operated in Majorca, had become collectors’ items. The books included collections of poems by other poets as well as Creeley’s own second book of poems The Kind of Act Of (1953), and his story-collection The Gold Diggers (1954).

He also published a set of letters written to him by the American poet who was perhaps Creeley’s truest mentor, Charles Olson. These were published as Mayan Letters by his Divers Press in 1953 and reissued by Cape in London and Grossman in New York in 1968. Later the whole of the Creeley-Olson correspondence was published, edited by George Butterick, in ten volumes (1980-90).

Meanwhile, too, Creeley had a BA degree in 1954 from Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where he was an instructor for several years and where he edited the Black Mountain Review, the voice of the school of poets associated with the college.

From Black Mountain College he went to the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, where he took his masters in 1960 and also taught for several spells, as a visiting professor, during the 1960s and 1970s.

He also became a visiting professor at Buffalo in 1966, and was Professor of Poetry and Letters there from 1978 to 1989, finally becoming Samuel Capon Professor of Poetry and Humanities. He was admitted to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1988, and, in addition to other honours, including the receipt of the Frost medal (1987), was New York State laureate poet, 1989-90. In 1999 he won the Bollingen Prize in American poetry.

Creeley never forsook his liking for the English Jacobean lyricists such as Thomas Campion (to whom he was introduced by Ezra Pound), or for Coleridge or Burns (from whose poetry he made a selection in 1989). Yet he was a consistent rebel against the tradition in which those poets wrote, much as the Anglophobic William Carlos Williams had been, without ever feeling the need to explain the contradiction implied by this.

Ironically, some of his earlier and longer poems are of interest even within that tradition which meant so little to their author. The well-known Kore, for example, well demonstrates his liking for the Jacobean lyric.

It was a lady
accompanied
by goat men
leading her.

Her hair held earth.
Her eyes were dark.
A double-flute
made her move.

“Oh love
where are you
leading
me now?”

Later these early, longer, poems gave way to such briefer poems as “We are here/ There are five/ ways of saying this”. There was greater discussion on whether these had achieved, as one critic asserted, “a certain mastery”, or whether they were in danger of descending into banality. But in general Creeley’s reputation increased, and he was even praised as “the Mallarmé of the new poetry”. Meanwhile, as a character he transformed himself from an originally quite angry personality into an increasingly genial one, and his public readings of his work had a large following.

Indeed, the celebration of his 70th birthday at the State University of New York at Buffalo, in October 1996, devoted to readings and lectures by him and others, lasted for three days.

In 1977 he made a third marriage to Penelope Highton, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

Robert Creeley, poet, was born on May 21, 1926. He died of pneumonia on March 30, 2005, aged 78.