Robert Creeley's long and productive writing life has resolutely witnessed personal rather than public change. Notoriously self-absorbed, his reticent poetry is fiercely individual in style and solipsistic in outlook. Like the poet, a man of few words, wryly humorous and intelligently self-contained, Creeley's poems seem determined “to say as little as possible as often as possible.” Yet the tightly crafted economy of this poetic idiom masks a curious amplitude which is easy to overlook. The tension between the persistent “circularities” in Creeley's work, his concern with the dualistic energies of contradiction and paradox, and the brevity with which such concerns are typically addressed, is worth noting, especially in the light of Creeley's abiding friendship with fellow poet, Robert Duncan, of whom Creeley once remarked:

I've always felt very close to him as a writer, although our modes of writing must seem to readers quite apart. I tend to write very sparely, and Robert has a lovely, relaxed and generous kind of movement. But…[he] showed me kinds of content that I hadn't previously recognized.