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This article is about the poet. For other people named Robert Duncan, see
Robert
Duncan.
Robert Duncan (January 7,
1919 – February 3, 1988) was an American poet
and a student of H.D. and
the Western
esoteric tradition who spent
most of his career in and around San
Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and
schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New
American Poetry and
Black Mountain College. Duncan's mature work emerged in the 1950s in the
literary context of Beat
culture. Duncan was a key figure in the San
Francisco Renaissance.
Overview
Not only a difficult poet, but also a public intellectual Duncan's
presence was felt across many facets of popular
culture. Duncan’s name is prominent in the history of pre-Stonewall gay
culture and in the emergence of bohemian socialist
communities of the 1930s and 40s, in the Beat Generation, and also in the
cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s, influencing occult and gnostic circles
of the time. During the later part of his life, Duncan's work, published by
City Lights and New Directions, came to be distributed worldwide, and his
influence as a poet is evident today in both mainstream and avant-garde writing.[1]
Birth
and early life
Duncan was born in Oakland,
California, as Edward Howard Duncan Jr. His mother, Marguerite Pearl
Duncan, had died in childbirth and his father was unable to afford him, so in
1920 he was adopted by Edwin and Minnehaha Symmes, a family of devoutTheosophists.
They renamed him Robert Edward Symmes; it was only after a psychiatric
discharge from the army in 1941 that he formed the composite of his previous
names and became Robert Edward Duncan.
The Symmeses had begun planning for the child's arrival long prior to his
adoption. There were terms for his adoption that had to be met: he had to be
born at the time and place appointed by the astrologers,
his mother was to die shortly after giving birth, and he was to be of Anglo-Saxon Protestant descent.[2] His
childhood was stable, and his parents were popular and social members of their
community—Edwin was a prominent architect and Minnehaha devoted much of her
time to volunteering and serving on committees.
Robert grew up surrounded by the occult in one form or another; he was well
aware of the circumstances of his fated birth and adoption and his parents
carefully interpreted his dreams. He was also told that in his lifetime he
would witness a second death of civilization through a holocaust. The family
adopted a second child, Barbara Eleanor Symmes, in 1920. She was born almost
one year after him, on January 6 of that year, and was chosen under
circumstances similar to that of her brother; her presence was expected to
bring good karma into
the family.
At age three, Duncan was injured in an accident on the snow which resulted in
his becoming cross-eyed and seeing double. In Roots
and Branches, his second major book, he wrote, "I had the double reminder
always, the vertical and horizontal displacement in vision that later became
separated, specialized into a near and a far sight. One image to the right and
above the other. Reach out and touch. Point to the one that is really there."
After his adopted father's death in 1936, Duncan started studying at the University
of California, Berkeley. He began writing poems inspired in part by his left
wing politics and acquired a reputation as a bohemian. His friends and
influences included Mary and Lilli Fabilli, Virginia
Admiral, Pauline
Kael, and Ida
Bear, among others. Duncan thrived as storyteller, poet, and fledgling
bohemian, but by his sophomore year he had begun to drop classes and had quit
attending obligatory military drills.
In 1938, he briefly attended Black
Mountain College, but left after a dispute with faculty on the subject of
the Spanish
Civil War. He spent two years in Philadelphia and
then moved to Woodstock, New
York, to join a commune run
by James
Cooney. There he worked on Cooney's magazine The
Phoenix and met Henry
Miller and Anaïs
Nin, who both admired his poetry. Cooney was less fond of its pagan tendencies.