Biography
Robert Duncan was born in Oakland, California, on January 7, 1919, to Marguerite Wesley and Edward Howard Duncan. His mother died immediately following his birth as a result of an influenza epidemic. His father, a day laborer, was unable to support and care for the child. Therefore, as an infant, Robert was put up for adoption and subsequently adopted by a family named Symmes. Mr. Symmes was a prominent architect who had offices in both Alameda and Bakersfield, California, where Robert spent his early childhood and adolescence.
The Symmes family was deeply involved in various forms of theosophy (a religious movement influenced by Buddhism). Robert’s adoptive mother’s sister would frequently interpret children’s stories, fairy tales, and myths with Gnostic and esoteric explanations to show young Robert the secret, deeper meanings of these seemingly harmless narratives. Duncan’s grandmother had been an elder in a hermetic religious order similar to Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s Order of the Golden Dawn.
Duncan’s early childhood experiences remained with him throughout his life and caused him to interpret practically all seemingly normal daily events as allegories corresponding to larger cosmic orders. Gnostic, hermetic, and alchemical lore continuously informed his imagination and became the groundwork for all of his major poetry. As Yeats’s imagination found its sustenance in Celtic folklore and mythology, Duncan’s spiritual core also found its center in his early apprehensions of his life as a spiritual enactment of mysterious powers he could only dimly perceive.
A sympathetic high school English teacher, Miss Edna Keough, spotted his obvious sensitivity to the beauty and seriousness of poetry; she helped him to envision it, as Duncan explained, “not as a cultural commodity or an exercise to improve sensibility, but as a vital process of the spirit.” She also introduced him to the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning, such as “My Last Duchess” and “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s.” Many of Duncan’s early poems resemble in both form and tone those sophisticated works of Browning, poems that historians of English literature have called the first modern poems in the language.
Ezra Pound, another spiritual mentor of Duncan during his college years, had also been heavily influenced by Browning’s ability to entertain multiple voices in his dramatic monologues, poetic devices that both he and Duncan practiced throughout their careers. Miss Keough also introduced the young Duncan to the work of a woman whose poetry became as vital to his own as that of Pound—Hilda Doolittle, or “ H. D.”
By the time Duncan graduated from Bakersfield High School, he had accepted his vocation as a poet and conducted himself accordingly as he began his college career at the University of California at Berkeley. He spent the years 1936 to 1938 there, where he published his first poems in a literary journal called Occident. He also lived an openly homosexual lifestyle and left California to follow his first lover to New York.
In Manhattan he became involved with a group of young writers which included Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen, and George Barker, all of whom were considered avant-garde outsiders of modern literature at the time. He also helped edit and publish the famous Experimental Review with Sanders Russell in Woodstock, New York. His marriage to Marjorie McKee lasted only a short time. He and his fellow writers were influenced by the quirky genius of both the French artist, poet, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau and the English poet Edith Sitwell.
In 1944, Duncan published an essay in Dwight Macdonald’s journal, Politics , titled “The Homosexual in Society,” an essay that was simultaneously an admission of...
(This entire section contains 1215 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
his own homosexual orientation and an argument for more humane treatment of homosexuals in general. After a storm of protests over such sexual honesty, Duncan returned to Berkeley in 1945 to resume his studies.
At Berkeley, he met and became part of a group of writers associated with the poet Kenneth Rexroth, who was highly critical of the literary establishment of the universities. At about the same time, Duncan also came under the intellectual tutelage of the great medieval and Renaissance historian Ernst Kantorowicz, an association so profound that much of Duncan’s work from the Berkeley years onward reverberated with medieval and Renaissance themes and allusions.
One of his first publications was called Medieval Scenes (1950), which attempted to evoke spiritually, via the creative process, “the eternal ones of the poem” in re-creating a specifically medieval mode or scene. Kantorowicz’s brilliant lectures turned Duncan’s attentions to medieval and Renaissance alchemy, which added considerable historical and philosophical depth to his earlier interests in Gnosticism and hermeticism.
It was also at this time that Duncan met and fell in love with a young art student named Jess Collins, with whom he spent the remainder of his life. Much of Duncan’s later poetry frequently alludes to the joyfully fulfilling domestic scenes of the household that he and Jess created for themselves over a thirty-seven-year period.
Having gained a small but distinguished poetic reputation, Duncan was invited to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1956 by its rector, Charles Olson, himself a burgeoning poet and literary theorist. He subsequently returned to San Francisco and participated in the literary ferment that Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were creating as spokesmen for the Beat movement. Duncan became, over the years, the only writer whose concerns were broad enough for him to be considered a part of the Beat poets, the Black Mountain poets, and the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance.
Duncan published more than twenty-six volumes of poetry and numerous limited publications from small presses during his lifetime. His literary reputation with the larger reading public began with The Opening of the Field (1960), an especially auspicious first major work, as it contained a number of poems that are included in virtually all important anthologies of American literature. Duncan began a series of open-ended prose-poem commentaries on poetics called “The Structure of Rime” that he weaves throughout the other poetic texts in The Opening of the Field. This series continued without closure until his death in 1988.
His next critically acclaimed volume of poetry was Roots and Branches (1964), which added not only eight more installments of “The Structure of Rime” but also several notable long poems, including “Apprehensions” and “The Continent,” and a closet drama on theosophical themes called “Adam’s Way.” Both these earlier volumes show Duncan’s poetic technique and range to be spectacularly accomplished and absolutely individual. Bending the Bow (1968) demonstrated Duncan’s ability to articulate his rage against the Vietnam War while at the same time deepening and delineating the multiple themes of “The Structure of Rime.”
He also initiated a new open-ended series of poems called “Passages.” After a self-imposed rule to publish no major volume for fifteen years, he produced the great works of his later years, Ground Work: Before the War (1984) and Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987).
There is little doubt that Duncan has taken his place as one of the major poets of modern American literature and that his complex but spiritually sustaining poetry will continue to inspire and nourish readers who view poetry as a serious spiritual enterprise rather than as the highly polished artifacts that fill up most poetry journals.
Criticism by Robert Duncan
