Duncan, Robert (1919-1988), was an American poet. He was associated with a group of poets who worked during the 1950’s at Black Mountain College, an experimental school in North Carolina. These poets sometimes are called the Black Mountain poets. Duncan was also a major figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, a cultural and artistic movement during the 1950’s.
Duncan wrote of the power of pagan, Christian, and Jewish myth to restore meaning to modern life. Other related themes are love, the imagination, history, and the recovery of a spontaneous and magical language.
Duncan’s most important early collections of poems are The Opening of the Field (1960) and Roots and Branches (1964). In these and other works, he used symbolic material and references to various ancient mythologies. Duncan increasingly dealt with political and social issues in his later works. For example, in the collection Bending the Bow (1968), he attacked American participation in the Vietnam War. Ground Work: Before the War (1984) and Ground Work II: In the Dark (1987) include poems inspired by medieval and Renaissance works. They also confront the evils of war and injustice. Duncan was born on Jan. 7, 1919, in Oakland, California. He died on Feb. 3, 1988. In 1960 and 1961, Duncan wrote a long critical examination of modernism in poetry. The book was published in its full form for the first time in 2011, after his death, as The H.D. Book. Duncan’s Collected Early Poems and Plays was published in 2012.
