Robert Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts. Loosing his father and the sight in his left eye in an accident before the age of five, Creeley's childhood was coloured by insecurity and for the rest of his life he viewed himself as a "dislocated" outsider figure.

Creeley attended Harvard University from 1943 to 1946, interrupting his studies with work for the American Field Service in Burma and India in 1944 and 1945. In 1946 he published his first poem in the Harvard magazine Wake, a student-led alternative to the established Harvard Advocate, but he did not graduate.

In the early fifties Creeley began correspondence with the poet Charles Olson, and at his invitation became a teacher at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1954. As the editor of The Black Mountain Review Creeley helped establish the so-called counter-tradition in post-war American poetry, begun by his early mentors Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and crystallized by Olson's Projectivist theories and the poets of the Beat era.

Robert Creeley was the New York Poet Laureate from 1989 to 1991 and won the Bollingen Prize in 1999.