“Love Song” by William Carlos Williams (1917)

Creeley’s long friendship with and admiration for Williams shaped Creeley’s own sense of poetic concision even when, or perhaps particularly when, the poet explores the careless, reckless energy of love. Love creates an excuse to get careless, to allow lines to implode under the stress of emotional excess. Here, one of Williams’s most passionate poems reflects Creeley’s sense of tight precise phrasing, how the intellect of the poet contains and controls the emotions of the man. The ties to “For Love” are evident in the poem’s opening line: “I lie here thinking of you” (Line 1). As in Creeley’s poem, the poet, lost in thought, is at once with and without his love, handling the lurking threat of the intellect trumping the heart.

“The Kingfishers” by Charles Olson (1949)

No contemporary poet of Creeley’s generation influenced Creeley’s work more than his personal and professional friendship with Charles Olson. Although never achieving the stature or success of Creeley, Olson directed Creeley toward embracing his sense of what Olson termed projective verse, a kind of riff on free verse that inclined poetic expression to minimalism, compressing powerful emotion into lines that seem at first sterile, even cold.