Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan was an American poet, essayist, dramatist, born in 7 January 1919, in Oakland, California and died in 3 February 1988, in San Francisco. As a child growing up in California, Duncan was exposed to Greek, Hebrew, and Germanic myths and to what he calls in The Truth and Life of Myth (1968) "Platonized theosophy." In the 1950s, Duncan's association with Black Mountain College in North Carolina brought him in close contact with Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and others in that circle. Later He returned to California and became an instrumental figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.

Usually associated with the Projectivists, Duncan has written extensively on his concepts of rhyme, open form, and field on the importance of myth. His major work is found in three volumes: The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), and Bending the Bow (1968). Duncan's poetry, consistent with Ezra Pound's dictum that "poetry is difficult," can bewilder the reader and frustrate the literary critic. Thus, his work has been dismissed as esoteric, deliberately obscure, and unfocused; but his verse, like Pound's, requires a grasp of cultural history and poetic tradition. Duncan's comments on Hilda DOOLITTLE, published in various journals, reveal his intense and thorough understanding of the development of modern poetry. He has long been obsessed with writing the momumental poem—the grand collage, he terms it—similar to Pound's ( 'antes. His goal is a poem whose internal forces determine its final form. Two of these attempts, the ongoing series called "The Structure of Rime" and the one called "Passages," are unending, open poems. The poems of "The Structure of Rime" were begun in the late 1950s while He was still at Black Mountain. In them Duncan is a private, almost solipsistic, poet concerned primarily with his attempt to master poetry. This series presents the necessary stages through which the neophyte poet must pass on his journey toward mastery of the language; it is in a sense a modified epic, depicting the inspiration, problems, and growth of the poet as hero. In "Passages," begun in the 1960s, his attempts to include a sense of expanded, communal consciousness. Through the deliberate assumption of a social and political voice, "Passages" extends what Duncan conceived as the role of the poet to parallel the tradition of Whitman, Pound, and William Carlos WILLIAMS. A constant in Duncan's work was his concern with myth. In poems such as "Nor Is the Past Pure" (1960), "Atlantis" (1960), "The Natural Doctrine" (1960), "A Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar" (1960), "The Continent" (1964), and "Two Presentations" (1964) his attempts to evoke a sense of mythic possibility—the "inner view," he terms it, in "Roots and Branches" (1964). His characteristic technique is to end the poem, as he does in "A Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar," poised on the brink of the moment of transcendent reality.

(source:  Encyclopedia of World Literature,  St. James Press, 1999)