Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan (born January 7, 1919, Oakland, California, U.S.—died February 3, 1988, San Francisco, California) was an American poet and a leader of the Black Mountain group of poets of the 1950s.

Duncan’s mother died in childbirth, and he was adopted by a couple who practiced theosophy, a religious philosophy characterized by esoteric doctrine and an interest in occult phenomena. His adoptive parents had selected him on the basis of the configurations of his astrological chart. This spiritual upbringing shaped his poetry, which he began writing when he was a teenager.

Duncan attended the University of California, Berkeley, in 1936–38 and 1948–50. He edited the Experimental Review from 1938 to 1940 and traveled widely thereafter, lecturing on poetry in the United States and Canada throughout the 1950s. He taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1956. The college, which closed in 1957, was renowned for its experimental approach to teaching and learning, and it attracted numerous artists who were associated with the avant-garde. He was a longtime resident of San Francisco and was active in that city’s poetry community.

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Duncan’s poetry is evocative and highly musical and uses a rich fabric of associations and images whose meanings are sometimes obscure. Myths and a visionary mysticism inform much of his poetry, though his thematic concerns also include strong social and political statements. His earlier poems were collected in The Years as Catches: First Poems, 1939–1946 (1966), and his poems of the 1950s appear in Derivations: Selected Poems, 1950–56 (1968). The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), Bending the Bow (1968), and Ground Work (1984) are collections of his finest poems. The first of these contains his most famous poem, “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow.” He also wrote plays, including Medea at Kolchis (1965).