Recognized as a seminal figure of American letters in the second half of the 20th century, Robert White Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, on May 21, 1926, attended the Holderness School and then Harvard College. He received degrees from The Black Mountain College (B.A., 1956) and the University of New Mexico (M.A., 1960).

After serving as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service in India and Burma, then living for a year outside Aix-en-Provence, France, Creeley moved in 1952 to Mallorca, where he founded and edited the Divers Press. Upon his return to the United States and at the invitation of Charles Olson, Creeley moved to North Carolina where he joined the faculty of the Black Mountain College and edited the short-lived but highly influential journal, The Black Mountain Review (1954 -1957). Though he left the college in 1955, Creeley had already established himself as one of the leading figures of the literary avant-garde of the 1950s, establishing with Charles Olson the "Black Mountain School,"one of the most important movements in American letters, the foundation of Projective Verse, a break from the New Criticism and its "insistence on form as extrensic to the poem. He is notable for having established a lasting association with his literary mentors-Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Bunting, and Dahlberg, among others-as well as those poets, writers and visual artists associated with the experimental arts of Black Mountain and the 1950s avant-garde. Among these are Paul Blackburn, John Chamberlain, Francisco Clemente, Cid Corman, Fielding Dawson, Jim Dine, Elsa Dorfman, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Robert Indiana, R.B. Kitaj, Denise Levertov, Marisol, and especially Charles Olson, with whom Creeley corresponded extensively and collaborated on Mayan Letters (1953). Creeley was also a presence in the San Francisco poetry renaissance, where he formed a life-long association with Barth, Corso, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and McClure. Creeley is currently the SUNY Distinguished Professor of English and holds the Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and Humanities at the State University of New York, Buffalo, a center of innovation and postmodern poetics, particularly that or those of the so-called "L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E" poets.

While his oeuvre includes short stories, essays, a novel, as well as criticism, Creeley is known principally as a poet. His friend and fellow poet John Ashbery has said of Creeley and his work, "He is the best we have." He has published over thirty volumes of verse since 1952, including: Words (1967); Pieces (1969); St. Martin's (1971); A Day Book (1972); Thirty Things (1974); Presences : A Text for Marisol (1976); Away (1976); Echoes (1982); Mirrors (1983); Memory Gardens (1986); and Windows (1990). His most recent collections of poems are Echoes (1994), published by New Directions, and Loops (1995), published by Nadja. Among his collections of poems are: For Love : Poems, 1950-1960 (1962); Poems 1950-1965 (1966); The Charm (1971); The Finger : Poems 1966-1969 (1970); The Door : Selected Poems (1975); Selected Poems (1976); The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975 (1982); and Selected Poems 1945-1990 (1991).

Creeley has been awarded numerous literary prizes, including the Horst Bienek Lyrikpreis from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Award, and a Rockefeller Grant. He was named New York State Poet Laureate in 1992. Creeley is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He lives with his wife, Penelope Highton Creeley, and two of his six children in Buffalo, New York.