Robert Creeley, a leading figure of postmodern American poetry who was known for his spare, concise language and a free-form style that distilled powerful emotions into verse, died Wednesday at a hospital in Odessa, Texas, after a brief illness. He was 78.
Creeley had been struggling with a lung ailment and died of complications from pneumonia, according to a spokeswoman for the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he taught for 37 years.
A prolific poet and critic who wrote more than 60 books over the last five decades, Creeley had been a distinguished professor of English at Brown University in Rhode Island since 2003. He had gone to Texas on a two-month writing residency funded by the Lannan Foundation, which maintains the writers retreat in Marfa, Texas, where Creeley had been working.
A 1999 recipient of the Bollingen Prize, poetry's top honor, Creeley was an early participant in movements that helped inspire the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. He was closely allied with writers of the Beat Generation, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, for whom he typed what may have been the first copy of the epic poem "Howl."
Creeley also was associated in the 1950s with the "Black Mountain Poets," whose other notable members included Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan. He emerged in the 1960s as a seminal figure in what became known as New American Poetry.
Creeley's death "has robbed American poetry of one of its last great bohemian modernists," poet Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts, told The Times on Thursday. "At his death he was a mainstream canonic figure, but he emerged and lived on the margins of American poetry."
Using what the Bollingen Prize judges praised as the "stubbornly plain language that makes a Creeley poem instantly recognizable," he wrote frequently about emotions as expansive as love and events as wrenching as aging and death. His best poems often were about those closest to him -- his mother, his wives, his children -- a preoccupation that prompted poet and critic Robert Graves to dismiss him as a "domestic poet."
Creeley embraced the distinction. He assumed an intimacy with readers, one that bred extreme brevity to the degree that he often used incomplete sentences and his own abbreviations, such as "sd" for "said." His unorthodox style was pronounced in "I Know a Man," one of his most anthologized poems, which presents a complex philosophical statement as a casual conversation between two men in a car:
