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Biography Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the New American Poetry and Black Mountain poets. Duncan's mature work emerged in the 1950s from within the literary context of Beat culture and today he is also identified as a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.
During the 1960s, Duncan achieved considerable artistic and critical success with three books; The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), and Bending the Bow (1968). These are generally considered to be his most significant works. His poetry is modernist in its preference for the impersonal, mythic, and hieratic, but Romantic in its privileging of the organic, the irrational and primordial, the not-yet-articulate blindly making its way into language like salmon running upstream.
In addition to his accomplishments as a poet and intellectual, Duncan's presence was felt across many facets of popular culture over a period of several decades. Duncan’s name figures prominently in the history of pre-Stonewall gay culture, in the emergence of bohemian socialist communities of the 1930s and 40s, in the phenomenon of the Beat Generation, in the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s, as well as in occult and gnostic circles of the same era. During the later part of his life, Duncan's work came to be distributed worldwide, and his influence as a poet is still evident today in the arenas of both mainstream and avant-garde writing.
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