Problems in Poetics: Robert Creeley in Theory and in Practice

This dissertation argues that Robert Creeley, a poet of the American counter-culture and the Black Mountain College, develops in his poetics linguistic resources that may be of use to disciplines further afield, and problems normally expressed in more philosophically sophisticated registers. Each chapter offers a close reading of a particular figure developed in Creeley’s work, and asks how this figure both updates a paradigmatically modernist poetics and avoids the poststructuralist poetics soon to be developed in Language writing. The reading pays particular attention to the non-discursive, extra-textual features in Creeley’s poetry, and argues that Creeley’s poetics emerge from experiencing thought and materials as constituent of each other. Finally, the dissertation rescues Creeley from the predominantly Heideggerian phenomenological frame with which he has been received. It suggests, instead, that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s physiologically informed phenomenology proves a more apt frame with which to theorize Creeley’s language. Given the revisionist reading, I offer Creeley as an example of a poet whose work, although both under-theorized and underappreciated, might prove serviceable to conceptual problems arising in disciplines as apparently distinct as theology.