Creeley was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn.

Creeley served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo.

In 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf, and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo.

In 1943, he entered Harvard University, but left to serve in the American Field Service in Burma and India in 1944–1945.

After teaching in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Creeley visited San Francisco for two months in the spring of 1956, having heard from Kenneth Rexroth about a local poetic "renaissance" underway.

There they started Divers Press and published works by Paul Blackburn, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and others.

In 1957, he met Bobbie Louise Hawkins; they lived together in a common law marriage until 1975 and had two children, Sarah and Katherine.

[11] Afterward, he wandered about a bit before settling into the English faculty of "Black Mountain II" at the University at Buffalo in 1967.

From 1990 to 2003, he lived with his family in Black Rock neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, in a converted firehouse at the corner of Amherst and East Streets.

It was hard for many readers and critics to immediately understand Creeley's reputation as an innovative poet, for his innovations were often very subtle; even harder for some to imagine that his work lived up to the Black Mountain tenet—which he articulated to Charles Olson in their correspondence, and which Olson popularized in his essay "Projective Verse,"—that "form is never more than an extension of content," for his poems were often written in couplet, triplet, and quatrain stanzas that break into and out of rhyme as happenstance appears to dictate.

"The Hero" is written in variable isoverbal ("word-count") prosody; the number of words per line varies from three to seven, but the norm is four to six.

M. L. Rosenthal in his book The New Poets quoted Creeley's "preoccupation with a personal rhythm in the sense that the discovery of an external equivalent of the speaking self is felt to be the true object of poetry," and went on to say that this speaking self serves both as the center of the poem's universe and the private life of the poet.

"Despite his mask of humble, confused comedian, loving and lovable, he therefore stands in his own work's way, too seldom letting his poems free themselves of his blocking presence" (p. 148).

In an essay titled "Poetry: Schools of Dissidents," the academic poet Daniel Hoffman wrote, in The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, which he edited, that as he grew older, Creeley's work tended to become increasingly fragmentary in nature, even the titles subsequent to For Love: Poems 1950–1960 hinting at the fragmentation of experience in Creeley's work: Words, Pieces, A Day Book.

In Hoffman's opinion, "Creeley has never included ideas, or commitments to social issues, in the repertoire of his work; his stripped-down poems have been, as it were, a proving of Pound's belief in 'technique as the test of a man's sincerity'" (p. 533).