[1] Born in an impoverished rural area of northern Wisconsin in 1924, his poetry career began in 1967 when his young son Richard died unexpectedly of spinal meningitis.
Fellow poets Charles Wright and James McMichael and novelist Oakley Hall taught poetry at UC Irvine during this time and shared directorship of the university's Master of Fine Arts program.
[3] Robert Bly, poet and author of Iron John, wrote about Peters's American Poetry Bakeoff book of criticism as "not maternal ... insights are set down simply, unornamented, as if intended to glance off, and yet I think they are important, and belong to the center ...
His poetry covers a wide range of themes and forms, from intensely personal volumes of private celebrations and losses—the death of a son, the break-up of a marriage, and his rural Wisconsin origins—to excursions into the psyches of a vast gallery of historical eccentrics, numbering among them, a Bavarian king, a Hungarian countess (and mass murderer) and a British romantic painter.
He adapted both King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Elizabeth Báthory,[5] the Hungarian Countess, for theatrical presentation, performing them around the country.
These performances are all well-documented in Peters's journals, video recordings, flyers, playbills, posters and scrapbooks, replete with reviews and photos, which are all housed and catalogued at UCSD Mandeville Special Collections Library.
Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List, summarized Peters's second memoir, Nell's Story, by saying, "As a fascinating exercise in obscure lives retrieved, as a joint effort in painful and exultant memory, this rich memoir has the playful seriousness and inventive charm which characterizes the work of Robert Peters".
He enjoyed Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fulbright Scholarship, and won the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America.
His working library of contemporary poetry, with related papers, is now in the Rare Book Collection at Bowling Green State University.