“Not I but the wind that blows through me”: Robert Creeley’s Emily Dickinson

Robert Creeley wrote constantly of his influences and affinities, yet one of the most important and apparent precursors to his work is curiously left out. Emily Dickinson’s influence is clear in Creeley’s vast body of poetry, ranging from her characteristically concise poems and jagged syntax to her insistent investigation of poetic personae. Yet Creeley published very little on her work directly. Many poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have made use of Dickinson’s poetic instigations, and Creeley is prominent among them. This essay looks at Creeley’s single, long-form consideration of Dickinson’s work in a three-part lecture series delivered in 1985. By considering these lectures, and by looking at Creeley’s life and later poetry, this essay makes clear the substantial impact Dickinson had on her fellow New England poet.