According to Lepson, Creeley is said to have studied the rifts and phrases of jazz legends like Charlie Parker to develop a sense of style. He even had several of his poems set to music by his friend Steve Lacey, she said.

He had a great genius for sound and the ways that sound and pause create meaning. Because of this, he was the best reader of his own work, she said.

Lepson also discussed the ups and downs of Creeley’s life.

“Happily and sadly are perhaps the two words he wrote most—always seeing two sides,” said Lepson. “I’ve never seen such a happy-sad person in all my life.”

Writing and editing more than 60 works, Creeley received numerous honors for his efforts—including a Guggenheim fellowship, Yale University’s 1999 Bolligen Prize in Poetry, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, two Fulbright fellowships, and a National Book Award nomination.

Always a New Englander, Creeley, lived in Providence R.I. with his wife Penelope. He is also survived by his first two wives, Ann MacKinnon and Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and by his eight children.

Hope H. Davis

Hope H. Davis, a writer, lifelong feminist and Radcliffe professor, died of pneumonia on October 2 at Wingate at Brighton physical rehabilitation center. She was 100.

Davis served as a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe in the 1980s and soon became a professor of writing in the Radcliffe Seminar Program. She continued teaching until one month before her death.

As primarily a teacher of journal writing, Davis strove to walk “the thin line between helping her students work on their writing and emancipating them as people,” recalled her daughter Lydia Davis of Port Ewen, N.Y.

A conscientious and invested teacher, Davis challenged her students to use language precisely to express themselves. She did not hesitate to criticize famous authors’ grammar even though she never graduated from college.

Davis was born in Iowa City, Iowa but later lived in New York and Washington D.C., promoting feminism during World War I and the Roaring ’20s. During the Depression she worked for the Agricultural Adjustment Agency and privately became a communist.

Communism lost its appeal for Davis after Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the nonaggression pact early in World War II, her children told the Boston Globe in 1993. But Davis remained vocal about progressive issues through her speeches and writing.

“She was always very aware of environmental groups, the ACLU and Doctors Without Borders and knew which ones were good and which were not,” recalled her son Stephen H. Davis of New York City. She also became more focused on creative writing and wrote short stories for The New Yorker. Davis published a collection of her fiction called A Dark Way to the Plaza and later a memoir entitled Great Day Coming.

As a professor at Radcliffe in the ’80s and ’90s, Davis taught a variety of writing seminars such as, “How to Keep a Journal” and “Autobiography as Detective Story.” She was named Teacher of the Year at Radcliffe when she was in her nineties.