Identifier:

Archival Resource Key

Dates:

1950-1996

Scope and content:

The correspondence series ranges from the early 1950s through the mid 1990s and contains letters, postcards, birthday and holiday cards, telegrams, and other items sent to Creeley. In later years, as Creeley began to use new technologies for correspondence, we have some copies of Creeley's own letters and notes to his correspondents. Most notable among these are his original facsimiles.

The collection is particularly rich in correspondence between Creeley and authors associated with late modernism and the Black Mountain School, as well as many members of the San Francisco Literary Renaissance and contemporary artists, including Paul Blackburn, John Chamberlain, Francisco Clemente, Cid Corman, Fielding Dawson, Jim Dine, Diane DiPrima, Elsa Dorfman, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Indiana, R.B. Kitaj, Denise Levertov, Gerard Malanga, and especially Charles Olson. Creeley's own letters to Olson, from 1950 to Olson's death in 1970, are housed at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs.

The correspondence series also contains some correspondence from Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Cid Corman, and Basil Bunting, including letters, cards, and photocopies of letters. Much of the correspondence from Robert Creeley to these authors was sold by Creeley to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (Williams), the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin (Zukofsky and Pound), the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington (Corman) and the John M. Olin Library at Washington University.

Other correspondence in the collection represents business communications between Creeley and his publishers, correspondence with his family and long time friends, correspondence with current and former students and colleagues, publishers requesting manuscripts, as well as admirers of his work who frequently sent unsolicited manuscripts. Correspondence sent with manuscripts has been housed in Series 3 : Manuscripts by Others, and should be consulted in order to get as complete a sense as possible of an individual's correspondence with Robert Creeley.

Arrangement:

The correspondence is arranged into three distinct subseries and represent three separate accessions of his work. The bulk of the correspondence is arranged alphabetically with one small subseries arranged chronologically. The date ranges indicated are rough indicators. Occasionally, especially in Subseries C. 1990 -1996, one will find correspondence which may predate date range. When possible, we have attempted to indicate the inclusive date range of documents in the correspondence series on the folder.

Contents

Access and use