Robert Creeley is one of the most published and discussed of twentieth-century American poets. However, while numerous critics have noted his use of short form, there has been relatively little discussion of the specific effects of that use of form or its wider implications. Creeley's characteristic clippedness is often used, sometimes with support from Creeley’s remarks in interviews and the ostensible content of his most famous collection, For Love, to assign him to a kind of lyric space characterised by the channelling of great emotion into spare frameworks. Less sympathetic critics have attacked Creeley on the same score. Notwithstanding his involvement with Black Mountain, the Beats and later generations of experimental writers, he becomes, in this analysis, a poet of essentially private concerns, with the explicit or implicit corollary that his work is ultimately of less substance than such long-form public-discourse monuments of American poetic modernism as Ezra Pound's Cantos, William Carlos Williams's Paterson, Charles Olson's Maximus or Louis Zukofsky's ‘A’.

Creeley, of course, had contact with all of these poets. All of them practised a version of the Poundian condensare, even in longer works, but Creeley pursued this impulse towards condensation to a distinctive conclusion. The result is work that engages with the world in similarly complex ways to those of the epic projects of his forebears and contemporaries in the Pound line. His writing challenges a pervasive assumption in academic poetry criticism: that short and long form tend to correspond respectively to lyric interiority and epic collectivity. Creeley's renovation of Poundian poetics cuts across private and public in a language that is characterised by refusal, negation and hesitancy. In this work's ascetic formal contours is an eloquent and sceptical encounter with the limits and risks of social being. The writing is the equal, in scope and ambition, of the more explicit visions of the interplay between ego scriptor and the social body offered in the modernist epic. I will make my argument through an analysis of the motif of refusal in Creeley's writing, and develop it by examining the melos to which Creeley attaches such weight in his short poems. The focus of my attention will be the writing of For Love, Words and Pieces, a series of books published in the 1960s in which Creeley probes the relationship between experience and poetic form.