Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan’s full name was Robert Edward Duncan, and he was a prolific American poet. He was born on January 7, 1919. His place of birth is Oakland, California. His mother, Marguerite Pearl Duncan, died during childbirth. He was initially raised by his father who named him Edward Howard Duncan Jr. In 1920, Robert Duncan was adopted by Edwin and Minnehaha Symmes, a family of devout Theosophists, because his father faced difficulty raising him. They gave him a new name Robert Edward Symmes. In 1936, he commenced studying at the University of California, Berkeley, after his adopted father’s death. He could not continue his study at Black Mountain College because of differences in opinion with the faculty over the Spanish Civil War. He lived two years in Philadelphia, United States, and then he went to Woodstock, New York Click to look into! >> Read More... , to join a commune (intentional community) run by James Cooney, where he engaged on Cooney’s magazine “The Phoenix.” Robert Duncan was also a public intellectual.

His prominent presence felt across many facets of popular culture, including pre-Stonewall gay culture. The publication of a critical essay “The Homosexual in Society,” in Political magazine, famed him in his early career in 1944, and this was the most eminent point in his career. In 1945, he came back to San Francisco, where he contacted Helen Adam, Madeline Gleason, Kenneth Rexroth, and Lyn Brockway. He went to Berkeley to study Medieval and Renaissance literature. In 1947, he wrote his first book “Heavenly City Earthly City,” published by Bern Porter. He initiated publishing in Cid Corman’s Origin in the early 1950s. He became an intrinsic part of the national poetry scene in the mid-1950s. He came to be known as the most notable poet of the “Black mountain poets,” while he was teaching at the Black Mountain College. He also gave his equal participation in the art, film, and occult circles. He achieved substantial artistic and critical success with the three significant books of poetry published in the 1960s - ‘The Opening of the Field’ (1960), ‘Roots & Branches’ (1964), and ‘Bending the Bow’ (1968). These books generally considered to be his most notable works. Robert Duncan’s correspondence with the British poet Eric Mottram started from 1971 to 1986, and published in ‘The Unruly Garden: Robert Duncan and Eric Mottram, Letters and Essays’ (Peter Lang), edited by Shamoon Zamir and Amy Evans Bauer.

He has got honoured with many awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Guggenheim Foundation, and The National Poetry Foundation. In 1984, he was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Robert Duncan died on February 3, 1988, in San Francisco after a long battle with a kidney disease.