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Robert Edward Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) was an American poet and a devotee of Hilda "H.D." Doolittle and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco.
Described by Kenneth Rexroth as “one of the most accomplished, one of the most influential” of the postwar American poets, Robert Duncan was an important part of both the Black Mountain school of poetry, led by Charles Olson, and the San Francisco Renaissance, whose other members included poets…
Robert Duncan - Born on January 7, 1919, in Oakland, California, Robert Duncan took an active role in emerging arts movements and communitites at the time—including Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, the San Francisco Renaissance and Black Mountain College—and developed a style uniquely his own.
Robert Duncan was an American poet, a leader of the Black Mountain group of poets in the 1950s. Duncan attended the University of California, Berkeley, in 1936–38 and 1948–50. He edited the Experimental Review from 1938 to 1940 and traveled widely thereafter, lecturing on poetry in the United.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The literary materials of Robert Duncan are chiefly held by The Poetry Collection. For more information, contact James Maynard, Associate Curator. The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. Robert Duncan papers, circa 1944-1966, including early letters, poem manuscripts and notebooks. Kent State University Libraries.
Few poets were as central to the postwar American poetry scene as Robert Duncan. He was a key figure of both the San Francisco Renaissance and the Black Mountain poets and carried on long (if sometimes combative) correspondences with avant-garde writers such as Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov.
As an adherent and innovator of what his friend Charles Olson called Projective Verse, Duncan favored a poetry that was breath-based, rhythmical, even ritually incantatory. To Duncan’s imagination, the poem was an archaeological record of language, and he was reverent to the point of obedience toward its ancient, mythical pronouncements.
