"I begin where I can and end when I see the whole thing returning." These words, from Robert Creeley's preface to The Gold Diggers …, express his early sense of writing, a sense predicated on the notion of evolving form. Implicit in his statement is the concept of poetic form as a function of an organic condition of structure—framed by an indeterminate point of departure and a somewhat more determinate point of termination, the latter somehow dependent upon the perception of some condition of the evolving process (i.e., "the whole thing returning"). The manner in which Creeley's poems end is an aspect of poetic structure, and when the ending is perceived as intrinsically whole or complete, his poems exhibit what Barbara Herrnstein Smith has termed "poetic closure."

In any consideration of structure in an art form which has language as its mode of expression, there are the...