Four Measures: On Robert Creeley's Standards Of Poetic Valuation

While declaring to be embarrassed for a lack of so-called larger view, Creeley has his own measures or standards of poetic valuation. From the bits and pieces of his talks and writings, four measures respectively concerned with the overall poem, the form, the language and the emotion of poetry can be pieced together, which are: 1) poetry is the measure of the poet's own phenomenality; 2) form is an extension of content; 3) words are things; and 4) emotion is a primary measure for poetry.By the standard that poetry is the measure of the poet's own phenomenaltiy, Creeley ventures an attempt to break poetry with preconceptions. In Creeley's poetry, this standard is reflected mainly by the chance flux of time, the priority of temporality over form, the disappearance of an identical subject and the fragmentation of the world. This standard of Creeley can have been directly or indirectly influenced by Keats. By comparing Keats'negative capability and Creeley's measure of the poet's own phenomenality, it can be seen that the latter may be taken as a contemporary version of the former.Creeley's measure that form is an extension of content is one of the three tenets of projective verse. It is closely related to the other two tenets. Creeley's"Le Fou"is a good demonstration of his poetics of form and of the interconnection between the three tenets. With its attempt to overthrow the binary opposition of form and content, Creeley's poetics of form bear distinct post-modern characteristics. However, Creeley is not always consistent with his theory of form in his poetic practice. Many of his poems show obvious traces of careful planning or post-factum revision, which are against his poetics of form that demands automatic composition.Creeley's measure concerning language is: words are things. Words'thingness is indicated in Creeley's poetry in four aspects: 1) problematized language-reality nexus; 2) words doing things or words that perform speech acts; 3) weakened subjectivity; and 4) highlighted physical features of language itself. To make sure that words are things, Creeley's approach is to be literal. In his opinion, to be literal is to write down exactly what the poet feels to be the reality. Here arises one suspicious element in Creeley's poetics of language. Since the reality on the poet's mind is not objective but quite subjective in a sense, it is not easy for other people to judge whether the language that presents such reality is literal or not. Words that are literal for one person may be figurative for another. Thus words'literality turns out to be something quite relative, and their thingness becomes a problem too. Another suspicious element in Creeley's poetics of language is that words'thingness comes out best in automatic writing while Creeley's"automatic"poems can be shown to have been revised. Creeley's poetics of language has evolved from the Pound-Williams-Zukofsky tradition and has been influenced by his friend Charles Olson and his contemporary visual artists, the Abstract Expressionists in particular. His interest in the intrinsic power of words has had an influence on the later Language Poets.Emotion has always been an indispensable element in poetry. This is no exception with Creeley, who believes that emotion is a primary measure for poetry. From the start of his poetic career to the end, emotion endures in Creeley's poems. Creeley's adherence to the first two measures actually enables him to turn out emotion in its rawest state. His adherence to the third measure, the thingness of words, is apparently contradictory with emotion, but in fact has helped him to turn out emotion in his own peculiar way. It is owing to the fact that Creeley not only holds emotion as a primary measure but also upholds the other three measures that his mode of turning out emotion differs a lot from the Romanticists and the Confessionals.Creeley's four measures do not exist individually but are closely inter-related. On the one hand, following one of the measures would mean follow the other three simultaneously. On the other, violating one of them would lead to the breach of the other three measures. It is ideal that all the four measures be well observed in poetic composition. Creeley has occasionally gone against them. Despite his occasional failures, his contribution to American poetry should not be neglected. With the four measures, he has developed the Whitman-Pound-Williams tradition and has helped to bring about the flourishing of Language Poetry.