Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness (review)

Peter O'Leary's book Gnostic Contagion is a welcome arrival, an extension of the critical theme of illness and literature to an intriguingtwentieth-century poet. With only one full-length study of Duncan on the shelves, O'Leary's book is overdue, and the emphasis on bodily illness appears promising. Robert Duncan viewed the act of writing poetry as a ritualistic process of reception, the poet acting as a conduit for words that issue from some unknown source. He was highly aware of the influence of physiological and psychological factors in this creative act. His mystification of the writing process may help explain the dearth of critical commentary on his work. How does one intellectualize about a poetics that justifies itself through an essentially religious belief system? Commentators such as Ekbert Faas have avoided this difficulty by focusing on aspects of Duncan's life, such as his homosexuality. O'Leary takes a surprising and mainly unfortunate tack. He buys so fully into Duncan's mysticism that he ultimately neither deconstructs it nor meaningfully comments upon it.

O'Leary, himself a poet, presents his own blooming interest in poetry as a spiritual awakening:

The first four poets I read with any seriousness, the poets that forced in me a religious conversion to poetry, were Yeats, Rilke, Duncan, and Whitman, in that order. . . . If poetry is a structure, these poets are its gateways for me; they are its gospeleers, graven above the entrance as theriomorphs. Each tells the story that cannot be told in his own rich and mythic version. Since this initiation, I have considered these four poets in the same slant of light: heroic, silvered, constantly shifting, difficult. (P. xi)

The author's unabashed enthusiasm is refreshing but also alienating to the reader, who may not have undergone a similar initiation. His Bronze Age imagery and phraseology, culled from the literature of mysticism ("the story that cannot be told"), clearly indicate that there are certain things he finds it neither necessary nor possible to explain.

Gnostic Contagion largely describes the impact of relationships not unlike the author's own with his favored poets. Its central assertion is that Robert Duncan was infected by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, the poet about whom he wrote a long, never-published book) with a viral gnosis, or spiritual knowledge. He in turn infected poets such as John Taggart and Nathaniel Mackey, to whom O'Leary devotes an extended section of the book. O'Leary's conflation of illness, significant to Duncan as a metaphor and a physical reality, with spiritual and poetic insight is ultimately somewhat glib. Burdened with the necessity of proving a highly abstract theory, the book covers a great deal of disparate ground, often with fascinating results. Much of it, setting its thesis aside, amounts to an elucidation of the poet's relationship to the mysteries of poetic inspiration. To some extent, as O'Leary shows, Duncan learned about the poetic faculty from H.D. (who, less convincingly, learned something similar from Freud) and passed this knowledge on to younger poets. O'Leary equates the poetic faculty with Gnosticism, medieval esotericism, Sufism, and psychoanalytic insight, based on the slenderest thread of connection, "the notion that what you see is not the real meaning of what you see" (p. 35). At such times, the further extravagance of inspiration as "Gnostic contagion" simply slips out of the argument. O'Leary is convincing on the distinct question of illness as a theme in Duncan's work. The strength of these passages is diluted, however, by O'Leary's tendency to use the concept of illness as an all-purpose trope.

In 1980, as detailed in the prologue, Robert Duncan taught a class at San Francisco's New College. I was lucky enough to take a class with Duncan only two years later, at Bard College. During...