For Love

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1962

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context

Although Robert Creeley would publish more than 60 titles across five decades, “For Love” reflects its own particular historical period, the 1950s, and specifically two influences: the Beat poets and jazz. For Creeley, these contexts are intimately related. Creeley spoke often of his fascination with the experimental rhythms of jazz and how the music of the late 1940s and early 1950s, particularly Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and singers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, gave him the vocabulary for his own explorations of rhythm. In exploring rhythm, which historically had been realized in poetry through expected rhythmic patterns and then provided its sonic complement with rhymes, Creeley found that words, like notes of music, can be driven not by the da-dum-da-dum-da-dum regularity of beat but rather by the sinewy suggestions of tempo. Poetry could be measured not by pre-established metrics but rather by the ear, intuitively, shifting and changing as the poem itself unfolds. Poetry, then, was designed to be heard, to be recited. Poetry was more a sonic experience than a thematic argument. Poetry was not about metaphors or symbols or themes. Poetry was about lines of words cut to time.

A poet, and a poem for that matter, yearns to be heard, the voice itself like an instrument. In this, Creeley’s poetry from the 1950s reflects his interest in the Beat poetry of the West coast, where Creeley spent some time absorbing the ways in which the poetic lines, most notably of Allen Ginsburg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, upended assumptions about poetic lines and poetic forms. These poets, among them Creeley, saw poetry as a public art meant to be recited, preferably to the accompaniment of jazz music, and in that complex aural construct, free poetry from its dreary responsibility to follow a beat and insist on rhymes. With this approach, the form matches the argument: Creeley himself asks in all but words how can such tidiness capture the conflict, the uncertainties, and the anxieties he feels in “For Love.”

Literary Context

Black Mountain College, an experimental liberal arts college tucked away in the Blue Ridge Mountains of rural western North Carolina, welcomed students for barely 20 years (1933-1956), but in that time the college became the epicenter of avant-garde movements across the arts in poetry, photography, painting, and music. Pioneering artists as varied as composer John Cage, painter Willem de Kooning, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and poets William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson as well as Creeley himself were drawn to the college’s bracing sense of daring, liberating experimentation. Defined by courageous manifestos and its own self-proclaimed commitment to creating new forms in the arts, Black Mountain College epitomized the audacious premise of post-war America, the defiance of convention and the elevation of the artist as crafter of forms that did not, really should not reflect inherited forms.

The Black Mountain poets especially took issue with what were the two defining traditions of post-war American poetry: the ponderous socio-cultural epics of the Modernists such as Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane, all of whom perceived the poet as a public figure commenting, often with stinging irony, on the woeful conditions of American culture; and, on the other hand, the perceived self-absorbed egotism of the Confessional poets, most notably Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton, all of whom regarded poetry as the exquisitely perfect vehicle for exploring their own psychological torments. The Black Mountain poets drew on the formal experiments of the Modernists but could not entirely trust the ego-immersion represented by the Confessional poets. The term “projectivist poetry” came to define their idea that the poet is in charge of the form but not licensed to wallow in the bathos of their emotions. That balance of formal experimentation and careful self-restraint defined the innovative verse of the Black Mountain poets.