The Company by Robert Creeley

First published: 1988, in The Company

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

In the poetry Robert Creeley wrote during the 1980’s, he began to turn back to the early stages of his life, placing his present thoughts in a larger perspective through reflection on decisive moments of the past. The recollective sense of “The Company” is immediately established by the first word, “Backward,” which is instantly qualified by the phrase “as if retentive,” suggesting how experience accumulates. Creeley’s placement of the well-known line from William Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up,” “The child is father of [Creeley says “to”] the man,” then gives the poem specific direction; a dual track from childhood is drawn in terms of “use” (or personal choice) and “circumstance” (the outside world). The first quatrain, written in open verse in a flowing line dense with information, is followed by three similarly shaped stanzas that examine the implications of this formulation. The poet draws conclusions from his experience, summarized in terse, almost aphoristic form. The randomness of existence and the difficulty in determining the presence of any form or meaning in most human actions are posed as a central theme, as the “great expectations” of the “next town” repeatedly turn into an “empty plate” in actuality.

The fifth stanza epitomizes this situation. The poet looks back at the young men such as himself who were reaching maturity in the historical moment of World War II. The war pulled them out of a comparatively privileged cultural position and set them between “all the garbage/ of either so-called side.” The poet remembers clinging to “an existential/ raison d’être like a pea/ some faded princess tried to sleep on,” but this turns out to be merely a trendy philosophical scheme with no real value for the poet.

In the last three stanzas, the poet shifts to the present and reaches beyond it toward the future. Proposing a philosophical position that would permit an understanding of his generation’s (or company’s) life and times, the poet envisions a “recorder” (another version of the writer) who must attend not only to the official version of events of historians (“in books”) or archaeologists (“under rocks”) but, more crucially, to what is central to human survival—“some common places of feeling.”

Although there is clearly a positive aspect to “the good times” that people must “take heart in remembering,” there is also a constant consciousness of an almost nameless dread, referred to as “whatever it was,/ comes here again,” a chilling indicator of the tenuousness of existence. The terrifying abruptness with which life can end engenders a feeling of unease, yet an adult’s awareness of this threat might enliven each moment in an oblique fashion through the energy generated by the fear of extinction. The repeated use of the word “last” in the final stanza suggests both closure and a continuance into the unknown.

Forms and Devices

Creeley has said that he is “very at home” with colloquial language, and “The Company” is written with “a sense of source in common speech” characteristic of Creeley’s voice. The vernacular is qualified by interposition of quotations from familiar poetry and brief catch-phrases with origins in foreign languages, which have become a part of American culture. These provide a contrasting context, establishing a tension between an official version of history and what Creeley feels are the genuinely significant elements of most people’s lives. The Wordsworth quote recalls not only “My Heart Leaps Up” but also the much more famous “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.” The Wordsworth reference seems to set a direction for the poem, but the data from one’s early years are called into question by a barrage of words such as “banality,” “vacant,” “disjunct,” and “ambivalent,” which question the data’s validity. Similarly, the line “Out of all this emptiness/ something must come…” is countered by the diminution of “great expectations” into “empty plates.” In both cases, the somewhat portentous, lofty prospects promised by official culture have been turned into hollow shells. Even the adventure and excitement of foreign travel combined with the epoch-making danger of a global war, turn into a groping for meaning through reliance on historical slogans.

Creeley describes himself as “one who has been long in city pent,” quoting from a sonnet by John Keats that also echoes John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” The references again set up a mood of expectation, but while “trying to make sense of it,” Creeley’s generation was “blasted” out of what he calls “humanistic” obligations. The use of the word “humanistic” is a reduction of the much more positive “human” of the last three stanzas, while the “oblige” of “noblesse oblige” carries again the pressure of externally imposed responsibility. The culmination of all these attempts to control “the company” Creeley speaks for is the failure of the more hip academic mind to offer some kind of explanation, its “existential raison d’être”—replete with sophisticated European connotations—collapsing into the simile of a “faded princess” (an exhausted Old-World image) who “was expectably soon gone.”

The clash between the dominant political and cultural ideas and a growing awareness of their inadequacy is ingeniously developed through the close control of words and their location, an important element of Creeley’s style in all of his work. There is a sense of qualification, even resistance, when the scientifically precise “scale” of the second stanza becomes the poetically suggestive “implication”; in the third stanza, the removal of the article before “small, still” compresses and intensifies the image of emptiness. The implication, without actual statement, of “we were” before “moving along” in the fourth stanza contributes to a growing sense of urgency expressed in rhythmic momentum. The first four stanzas are written in short word bursts, hesitant and incomplete, which mark the poet’s confusion and distrust. An expository section that follows (stanzas 5 through 7) is composed of longer lines, a flowing narrative that encapsulates the deceptive and unsatisfactory “solutions” presented in polished rhetoric by the spokesman for a settled society. The last three stanzas occur as a single long, deliberative line. In a final rejection of what is expected, the repetition of the word “last” produces a pattern of continuance, so that even the feared end of life is qualified by the resonant reverberation of the words themselves.

Bibliography

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Edelberg, Cynthia. Robert Creeley’s Poetry: A Critical Introduction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978.

Faas, Ekbert, and Maria Trombaco. Robert Creeley: A Biography. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2001.

Ford, Arthur. Robert Creeley. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978.

Foster, Edward Halsey. Understanding the Black Mountain Poets. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

Fox, Willard. Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.

Oberg, Arthur. Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creeley, and Plath. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1977.

Rifkin, Libbie. Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-Garde. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000.

Terrell, Carroll, ed. Robert Creeley: The Poet’s Workshop. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1984.

Wilson, John, ed. Robert Creeley’s Life and Work: A Sense of Increment. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987.