“Heroes” is a poem by American author Robert Creeley about the afterlife of myths and legends. The poem first appeared in his 1960 collection For Love: Poems, 1950–1960, and was republished in The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1945-1975. Although he had published his first collection a decade earlier, Creeley received widespread critical recognition after For Love. Creeley often wrote about art, identity, and relationships. He is commonly grouped with the Black Mountain poets, a group of writers including Charles Olson, Hilda Morley, Ed Dorn, Paul Blackburn, and others. These poets were associated with Black Mountain College, an experimental liberal arts school in North Carolina. In their work they sought to break away from older "closed" poetic forms and refocus their attention on capturing sensations and perceptions. For these poets, the line was the most important structural unit in a poem; each observation or comment had to be self-contained. This focus is strongly present in "Heroes," as Creeley wrestles with the idea of how to apply the stories of mythic heroes like Aeneas and Hercules to a modern context.
The poem begins by alluding to the stories of Aeneas and Hercules, stating that they were always moving on to the next major event. Then, Creeley points out a quieter, more human moment in the Aeneid, in which Virgil writes about Aeneas asking a priestess how to visit his father in the underworld. Creeley quotes Sibyl, the priestess, and announces himself as the speaker. He comments that Virgil is long dead, but these stories still live on. He ends the poem by saying that people still need these figures and stories to inspire their own "labors."
The poem is made up of four quatrains of variable line length. The lines themselves are heavily enjambed, which makes groups of lines feel like a single, cohesive thought. In this text, Creeley seems to grapple with what these heroes mean and how people can still make use of them in their everyday lives. The partial solution he seems to arrive at is an acknowledgment of these individuals' humanness as a way into their stories. At the same time, he questions what it means for writers to preserve these stories, even as he himself is doing so in the writing of this poem.
