Robert Duncan

Profoundly original yet insistent on the derivative quality of his work, transgressive yet affirmative of tradition, Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was a generative force among American poets, and in his poetry and poetics was a major figure in mid- and late- 20th-century American letters. This, the seco [...]
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Profoundly original yet insistent on the derivative quality of his work, transgressive yet affirmative of tradition, Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was a generative force among American poets, and in his poetry and poetics was a major figure in mid- and late- 20th-century American letters. This, the second volume of Robert Duncan's collected poetry and plays, presents authoritative annotated texts of both collected and uncollected work from his middle and late writing years (1958-1988), with commentaries on each of the five books, The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, Bending the Bow, and the two volumes of Ground Work. The biographical and critical introduction discusses Duncan as a late Romantic and postmodern American writer, his formulation of a homosexual poetics, his development of the serial poem, the notation and centrality of sound as organizing principle, and his relations with such fellow poets as Robin Blaser, Charles Olson, and Jack Spicer, his indebtedness to Alfred North Whitehead, and his collaborations with the painter Jess Collins, his lifelong partner.Texts include his anti-war poems of the 1960s and 70s, his hommages to Dante and other major figures, and his translations from the French of Gerard de Nerval, as well as the complete "The Structure of Rime" and "Passages."