The poems in Words show Robert Creeley looking for a way to measure his accomplishment in the world. His early poems, collected in For Love, attest to the fact that he once defined himself in terms of the power of his intelligence, his relationship with his wife and the challenge of his craft. The poems in Words make it clear that he would not be satisfied with general assessments and vague phrases. The individual poems in this volume can best be understood and appreciated as elements in a process of self-discovery. Creeley is trying to find out precisely what is important to him about thought, love and poetry and what is not. (p. 265)

This study of Creeley's three major recurrent preoccupations focuses attention on those poems in Words considered to be the most important to the development of his themes. In the course of reevaluating life-ordering suppositions concerning...