Poetry Commons^™

“A Consistently Useful Measure”: Robert Creeley’S Writing/Reading Of Wallace Stevens, Patrick James Dunagan

Gleeson Library Faculty and Staff Research and Scholarship

While William Carlos Williams is the immediate literary predecessor often associated with having early influence on the work of Robert Creeley, Wallace Stevens, beginning in Creeley’s first letters in the early 1950s to the poet Charles Olson, and re-emerging in his later work, makes several appearances in the printed record. References to Stevens culminate in the final section of Creeley’s long poem “Histoire de Florida,” published in 1996, the beginning of the last decade of his life, where lines from Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar” (a poem which, as will be shown, remained central to Creeley throughout his life) are …