Gendered Muses and the Representation of Social Space in Robert Duncan’s Poetry

Recent criticism has shown the importance of Robert Duncan’s correspondence with Denise Levertov for understanding the evolution of cold war poetics from the domestic focus of 1950s poetic culture through the political poetry of the 1960s.¹ Duncan wrote both poetry about and letters to Levertov, but the difference between his epistolary and poetic representations of Levertov is striking. Whereas the friendship (and the argument over Levertov’s To Stay Alive that ended the friendship) is carried on in predominantly genderneutral terms in the letters (with two main exceptions that I will discuss), Duncan’s poetic representations of Levertov accentuate her femininity and heterosexual eros. Although in their letters Duncan and Levertov sometimes talk of their friendship in terms of love, they usually focus on this love not as eros but as a deep, nonsexual devotion stemming from a shared poetic project (Letters 325). As late as 1969, Duncan characteristically refers to a shared identity of “us as poets” (Letters 632). Their discussions of creativity and craft are almost never explicitly gendered—much less often, for example, than in Levertov’s correspondence with William Carlos Williams—and questions of gender or sexual orientation arise only occasionally.²

Levertov figures most prominently in Duncan’s political poetry, where she appears as a muse or interlocutor who charges the public space of the poem with gender tension. In “Bending the Bow,” she assumes the multiple feminine figures of “woman,” “girl,” “something of sister and of wife,” and Eurydice to Duncan’s Orpheus (7). “Santa Cruz Propositions,” in Ground Work, portrays her as the Hindu deity Kali, maternal goddess of destruction, motivated by “Woman’s anger” and displaying violent feminine adornment in “her dress of murderous red /. . . her mini-skirt,” “her make-up,” and “her fashion of burning” (49).³ In contrast, Duncan and Levertov’s discussion of this poem focuses on Kali’s significance as a figure of revolution, not on Levertov’s femininity.⁴ “The Torn Cloth,” Duncan’s poem of reconciliation to Levertov after their break, develops the imagery of marriage and hymen to “re-weav[e]” an epistolary friendship relatively free of reference to gender and sexuality (Ground Work 141). In Duncan’s political poetry, Levertov seems to preside over an intersubjective space where gender difference enthralls and threatens.

The two major discussions of gender in the letters reinforce Levertov’s role as enraged and enraging feminine muse of a public arena charged with gender conflict. First, Duncan psychologizes Levertov’s apparent rage at “an experience of Viet Nam” as an expression of indirect feminist rage against patriarchal oppression, of her “deep underlying consciousness of the woman as a victim in war with the Man” (Letters 667).⁵ For Duncan, gender difference and the pain, rage, and damage it causes are Levertov’s true political muses. Second, Duncan criticizes Levertov’s image of the spider web as a metaphor for natural order and beauty in “Life at War,” insisting on the web’s predatory function, gendered as “the commonly known story of the spider-web and the female’s relation to the male” and “murder and cannibalism [well known characteristics of the spider in its sexual life]” (Letters 694–97; Duncan’s brackets). ⁶ Duncan later attributes this predatory violence to his imagination, apologizing retrospectively for his “contention with my own anima—. . . an idea of womanly virtues or powers created in the matrix of collective imagination [the cultural self] and of personal imagination [the individualization]. For much of what I suspect you of, or accuse you of, I suspect as some womanish possibility in myself” (Letters 699; Duncan’s brackets). Duncan locates the figure of the feminine at the intersection of self and other, individual and collective imagination as the source of an invasive violence in the commerce between social and personal that inspires his political poetry.

We may attribute the differences between Duncan’s epistolary and poetic representations of Levertov to a range of emotion, even love, not expressed in their correspondence, or to biographical roots in Duncan’s childhood. Peter O’Leary...