Robert Creeley (1926–2005) published more than sixty books of poetry, prose, essays, and interviews in the United States and abroad, including If I Were Writing This, Selected Poems 1945–1990, The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005, and The Island. His many honors include the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Distinguished Professor in the Graduate Program in Literary Arts at Brown University.

“His influence on contemporary American poetry has probably been more deeply felt than that of any other writer of his generation.”—New York Times Book Review

“Rediscovering poetry’s bardic roots in lyric and song, Creeley made the melody new, spiked it with the jazz of consciousness.”—Voice Literary Supplement

“The subtlest feeling for the measure that I encounter anywhere except in the verses of Ezra Pound.”—William Carlos Williams

“It is a study, how Creeley lands syntax down the alley, and his vocabulary—pure English—to hit meters and rhymes all of which are spares and strikes.”—Charles Olson

“Robert Creeley’s poetry is as basic and necessary as the air we breathe; as hospitable, plain and open as our continent itself.”—John Ashbery

“Robert Creeley has created a noble body of poetry that extends the work of his predecessors Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, and Olson, and provides like them a method for his successors in exploring our new American poetic consciousness.”—Allen Ginsberg

“Creeley is a touchstone for me–a measure of what poetry is. He is a genius of the sensorium as Kerouac was and a master of the ear as is Miles Davis. He is a carver in space like Van Gogh.”—Michael McClure