For Love

Robert Creeley’s “For Love” (published in 1962 but written earlier), ostensibly addressed to Creeley’s wife Bobbie, starts with a simple premise: I have been thinking about what your love means to me. Through the tangled logic of his heart, however, the poet finally concedes that every stab at defining this emotional experience, itself asserted against a life that is otherwise empty and thin, full of pain and loneliness, in the end frustrates him.

Given their grounding in the complexities of the emotions, poets since Petrarch in the 14th century have claimed special ownership of love and its tectonic impact. Creeley’s poem, however, reflects upon what happens when figurative language meets difficult reality: The experience of love—rich with contradictions, essential mysteries—evades language.

The poem itself reflects Creeley’s mastery of the spare and austere minimalist language of Postmodernism; his quiet poetics, lines at once complex and elliptical, concise and chiseled, mark Creeley as a poet’s poet. He was prolific (more than 60 volumes of poetry across five decades), but his poems can seem intimidating to a lay reader. However, they have been studied (and imitated) now by three generations of poets and students of poetry, which makes Creeley one of the most influential American poets of the fin-de-millennium.

Poet Biography

Robert Creeley was born in 1926 in the picturesque town of Arlington just north of Boston. A car accident when he was two required removing his left eye. His father, a respected physician, died two years later. Creeley was raised by his mother, a nurse, who moved with Creeley and his older sister to the rural town of West Acton, about 10 miles west of Boston. The family struggled financially. A precocious reader early on, Creeley published his first poems and essays in his high school literary magazine. Matriculating at Harvard in 1943, he left college to serve in the American Field Services as an ambulance driver in the Burma theater of operations. His return to Harvard after the war was frustrating for Creeley—he felt his poetry was underappreciated by the faculty; he published a scattering of poems in prestigious literary journals and left Harvard without a degree.

Eager to immerse himself in the exciting experimental poetry of the post-war, Creeley began what became a lifelong correspondence with Minimalist poet William Carlos Williams, who in turn directed Creeley to Charles Olson, whose concept of “projective verse” became instrumental in Creeley’s evolution. From his teaching post at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Olson had published radical manifestos that theorized that the time was right for American poets to forsake inherited models of prosody and to shape a defiantly new kind of poetry whose very form would reflect the poet’s convictions and designs. The correspondence deepened into a friendship, and Olson offered Creeley a teaching post at Black Mountain College and an editorship of its avant-garde poetry review.

For more than 30 years, Creeley would teach poetry at a variety of university posts, most notably at the State University of New York at Buffalo. During that time, he published poetry collections at the rate of nearly one per year. His poetry grew increasingly more restrained, more suggestive, his sense of tempo and line construction influenced as much by his embrace of the free verse lines pioneered by the Beats as by his intuitive perception of the complex metrics of hard bop jazz. Although many readers found his later poetry arcane and unapproachable, younger poets found his lines mystical and suggestive in ways that echoed Eastern concepts of simplicity and directness.

Recognition of his impact and his influence mentoring young poets would come with the 1962 publication of his collected poems, which included “For Love.” His output only increased during the 1970s and the 1980s—indeed, he was awarded the 1999 Bollingen Prize, a sort of lifetime achievement award for poets presented annually by the faculty of Yale University. While serving as writer-in-residence at the prestigious Lannon Foundation in Marfa, Texas, a kind of think tank/retreat for artists, Creeley, a hard drinker and lifetime smoker, died in 2005 at the age of 78 from pulmonary distress. He was buried back home in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Arlington, Massachusetts, his simple marble marker offering quiet advice in his signature preciseness and clarity: “Look at the light of this hour.”

Poem Text

Creeley, Robert. “For Love.” 1962. The Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The poem is dedicated to Bobbie Louise Hall, Creeley’s second wife, and is presumably addressed to her. The poem opens with a direct expression of intent: yesterday, the poet admits, he tried to speak of “it” (Line 2), to write about the love between the two of them, that “sense above / the others” (Lines 2-3) that means so much to the poet. For the poet, everything he knows “derives” (Line 5) from this emotion and from what it teaches him. Yet, after a day of struggling to find some expression, some language that might capture this emotion, he has nothing to show. He feels “helpless” (Line 8); to him, love seems elusive. Love wants to “turn away, endlessly / to turn away” (Line 11), resisting even his dedicated efforts to express how much it means to him.

The poet tries to jumpstart his love poem by invoking the moon, a traditional symbol of romance in love poetry, but then stops the thought abruptly because the symbolism doesn’t work. For him, love seems only approachable either as a memory or as a fantasy, either something lost to the past or something hopelessly dangling ahead of him: “That is love yesterday / or tomorrow, not / now” (Lines 19-20). So he turns to something immediate: talk of food, shared meals, the meals she cooks. The poet thinks better of this, however, for this makes love part of a negotiation, a system of earned rewards. Love is no reward, for he has done nothing to earn this tectonic feeling.

The poet fears that this love is little more than the “vague structure” of his own mind. To reassure him of its reality, he inventories his life without love. In Lines 29-32 the poet turns from his self-assigned task of defining love to acknowledge that without that energy in his life, his life would be dismal: a “tedium,” its “despair” sustaining “a sense of isolation” and “whimsical if pompous” egocentricity. So why does love taunt him to the edge just beyond the reach of his words? He is a wordsmith—why is he stuck? “Love, what do I think / to say. I cannot say it” (Lines 37-38). There he admits it. Maybe love is the woman herself, a “companion, good company / crossed legs with skirt, or soft body under / the bones of the bed” (Lines 41-44).

Love eludes the poet’s powers perhaps because language is most useful, the poet says, with expressing anxieties or wishes, fears or hopes—“Nothing says anything / but that which it wishes / would come true, fears / what else might happen” (Lines 45-48). Love is neither anxiety nor wishing. Love is now, it exists not in some other time or in some other place. So how to put into words this feeling? It is not so much a confession, those the poet sniffs are the prosaic cliches of those who see in love little more than selfish obsession. His obsession is not with possessing this Other but rather his obsession is to tell her about it.

In the end, the poet argues, the frustrations come because this love is itself a manifestation of an ideal kind of love, greater than the two of them, larger than their limited time and space. In this, her face, so immediate and so there, is actually part of the “company of love,” an expression in the immediate of a feeling that is eternal. Your face, he tells his lover, belongs to that greater company. She is (and by extension their love is) a manifestation of “some time beyond place, or / some place beyond time” (Lines 58-59). More than a clever phrase (although it certainly is that), the line reflects the poet’s acknowledgement that love, when it is love, elevates the person into a greater reality, as much an expression of the heart as it is a perception of the intellect.