Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation

1. Robert Duncan’s Miltonic Persuasion: The Emergence of a Radical Poetic

chapter one Robert Duncan’s Miltonic Persuasion: The Emergence of a Radical Poetic sar ah e. ehlers In his 1942 poem “The Years as Catches,” Robert Duncan writes: “I brood upon these lines of Milton, words / where there moves such a tide to feed / my restlessness.”1 The restlessness Duncan refers to is multifarious: during the late 1930s and early 1940s, already feeling alienated because of his homosexuality, Duncan realized (as he writes in his 1966 introduction to The Years as Catches) that his “deepest social feelings were irregular too,” and he wrestled with his growing abhorrence for the American state and what he bitingly referred to as “the Roosevelt panacea.”2 This manifested in what Duncan retrospectively called “poems of irregularity”—poems that, as his friend Thom Gunn observes, allowed the poet’s “merging consciousness, finding its desires out of harmony with those of the society around it,” to extend itself into a realm of art “where things are not judged by mere regularity ” and “where one in fact aspires to the extraordinary—The Divine Comedy, King Lear, Ulysses.”3 Certainly, one could add John Milton’s Paradise Lost to Gunn’s list of “extraordinary” literary works; and further, as I demonstrate in what follows, Duncan’s early poetic aspirations are significantly shaped by what Duncan calls a “Miltonic persuasion,” by his “brood[ing] upon” the lines of Milton. But Milton does more than fire Duncan’s political and poetical imaginations. By making Milton a key figure in his own tradition, 4 Robert Duncan’s Miltonic Persuasion Duncan traces new lines of influence and thus establishes his own unique version of the trajectory of modern and contemporary American poetry.4 Gunn’s essay catches Duncan on the cusp of his groundbreaking 1944 essay “The Homosexual in Society,” and he posits that Duncan’s public avowal of his homosexuality ultimately helped to establish him as the “chief originator” for speaking openly about sexuality in American poetry.5 But more recent readers of Duncan, like Eric Keenaghan, have emphasized Duncan ’s commitment to a universalism that addresses “homosexual content” in poetry without either “elevating or denigrating” it.6 Indeed, what a particularized version of Duncan’s poetic biography might miss is that “The Homosexual in Society” is as much about the relationship of the individual will to social control and the potential dangers of group membership as it is about heterosexism per se. As Robert J. Bertholf puts it in his essay “Decision at the Apogee: Robert Duncan’s Anarchist Critique of Denise Levertov,” “the freedom of the individual to act on his own is the paramount assumption of the essay.”7 And, I would add, this is one of the paramount assumptions of Duncan’s career: the individual working against—to borrow the very terms Duncan uses in “The Homosexual in Society”—the “overwhelming forces of inhumanity.”8 But such declarations never come ready-made. During the earliest years of his career Duncan borrows heavily from Milton. It seems that Milton, perhaps more than any of Duncan’s diverse influences, provides a persona and a vision that facilitate how Duncan shapes his visions of poetry and self and ultimately prompt the important work of “The Homosexual in Society.” A consideration of Duncan’s life and work during the 1930s and 1940s reveals how, during a moment of political and creative crisis, Milton offers Duncan an apt model for an individual who stands outside of or in opposition to established institutions, literary or otherwise. Duncan’s biographer Ekbert Faas provides a key to this influence, noticing the presence of Milton in poems like “Variations upon Phrases from Milton’s The Reason of Church Government” and “The Years as Catches.” As Faas notes, the theological rhetoric of Milton’s prose influenced the style of Duncan’s early poems, including their logic and syntax. Such rhetoric, in turn, helped to provide a persona for the young poet. For Duncan, “also impressive in Milton was Sarah E. Ehlers 5 the revolutionary fervor of the Protestant patriot as well as the poet’s final disillusionment.”9 In the 1966 introduction to The Years as Catches, Duncan explains that during the early 1940s he was “seeking to find areas of being thru a series of rhetorics,” and this search included “ransacking the theological rhetoric of Milton.”10 In Duncan’s early poetry he often emulates Milton’s poet-activist stance as well as his...