Robert Creeley Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Alan Williamson

Critical Essay by Alan Williamson

["Later" has much to say] about aging and death; and it comes as a bit of a shock to realize that [its author is] over 50, and [belongs]—since the death of Elizabeth Bishop—virtually to the senior generation of American poets. The shock comes, I suppose, mainly because [he has] so tenaciously played the role of enfant terrible, staking a great deal, as many members of [his] poetic generation have, on the anti-rationalism—the distrust of order and hierarchy as principles for society, the mind or art—that swept through our culture in the 1960's. Partly for this reason, [his] poetry continues to raise some of the problems of experimental work, though [he is] at an age when most writers either do, or decisively do not, communicate an almost unconscious stylistic authority.

Robert Creeley—I hasten to qualify—established a permanent place for himself, well before 1960s, as what the painters would call a "little...
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