Robert Creeley is, in my opinion, the finest personal poet of our time. We are in a period when personal poetry has apparently been a necessity, or the natural mode, for a great many writers. We have turned our backs on the impersonal poetry of T. S. Eliot, in which the poet disavowed his emotions or at least held them at arm's length, which presented dramatic monologues or dramatic lyrics, masks and personae, as, we have come to think, a means of displacing or repressing one's most powerful or most awkward feelings. If one may speak of the psychological growth of a culture, I would say that during the first half of our century, following the trauma of the First World War, we were engaged in re-establishing what Jung calls a persona, that segment of our total psyche which we choose for consciousness, the face which we show to others and ourselves. We were engaged in redefining ourselves ideologically, theologically, stylistically. It was a period of fixed forms or traditional styles, of narrow personae which confined under pressure and tried to ignore large segments of the psyche. The restlessness under such conditions of a few strong spirits like Pound and Williams became a flood after World War I1. We began to open ourselves to ourselves and to others much more fully than ever before. I think that confessional is probably a good name for the