Collected Essays and Other Prose

by Robert Duncan, James Maynard (Editor)

This volume in the Collected Writings of Robert Duncan series gathers a far-reaching selection of Robert Duncan’s prose writings including most of his longer and more well-known essays along with other prose that has never been widely available. Ranging in original publication dates between 1940 and 1985, the forty-one titles reveal a great deal about Duncan’s life in poetry―including his impressions of poets whose work he admires, both contemporaries and precursors. Evocative and eclectic, this work delineates the intellectual contexts and sources of Duncan’s poetics, and opens a window onto the literary communities in which he participated.

Genres: Poetry

592 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Robert Edward Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) was an American poet 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 saw his work as emerging especially from the tradition of Pound, Williams and Lawrence. Duncan was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scholarly judgments may also be political acts. There's something glorious in flipping back to James Maynard's notes, at the close of this volume, and noticing 1.) that Duncan consented to have "The Homosexual in Society" (1944) reprinted in the year of W. H. Auden's death, 1973, in a magazine -- of which I had never heard -- called Fag Rag, so that you wonder about the motivation of that, and 2.) that the letter that Duncan quoted from, substantively, in his 1959 revision of the essay, done for Seymour Krim's anthology of Beat Writing, and rejected by Krim we're not sure why but likely as not for the legal bother of it being quoted-from unattributed, is a letter, Maynard puts paid by informing us in those same notes ["W.H. Auden to Robert Duncan, 1 December 1946, Robert Duncan Collection, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University of Buffalo, The State University of New York" -- go seek it out, fortune-hunters!], authored by W. H. Auden. Then reeling from the rejection of "Notes Toward an African Elegy" by Ransom and The Kenyon Review, when Ransom had accepted it but then read in politics the essay Duncan wrote exposing himself as "The Homosexual in Society," Duncan applied by letter to Auden for Auden's permission to develop his (Duncan's) ideas about the camp, which the politics essay had described as a "tone, loaded with contempt for the human." Duncan had required Auden's poems for the development of his ideas. Auden said No, thank you, sir. So Isherwood's novel introduced the word camp to Sontag, etcetera. I had known for years it was Auden, that Auden brought camp into the language from his Berlin cruising but could not be made responsible to it, and it was precisely this veil of the public poet's secret language that the frisson of Katy Perry, Elton John and countless others drew upon. BUT it was a supposition, it could not be found. Poor Maynard, it disturbed me no end to be reading in the authorized collection of Duncan's prose Duncan's revision to this essay, which revises substantively -- changing, e.g., "loaded with contempt for the human" to "loaded with contempt for the un-initiated" (big difference), and removes the context of "the pseudo-folk" in Duncan's response to James Agee's article on the same in a 1944 Partisan. It was the politics text, after all, that raised the hackles on the rube's Ransom. But there are many other very good reasons to like this new, scholarly edition: For those Duncan readers who have not before read the 1961 essay on anarchistic themes, "Properties and Our Real Estate" (it had only little magazine publication until now), you're in for a treat. "A Critical Difference of View" (available until the present volume in only a botched text) is Duncan's crucial statement on prosody, and the Williams line. The canonical texts are elsewhere available, more thriftily perhaps, but here, too, are Duncan's words, which I quote to Students Twice Yearly, from "The Truth and Life of Myth," and which are available elsewhere on this site: my link text . Nowhere else on the psychotic voice in narrative but here. The solid sense of the thing will not be gainsaid.