from Dante Études, Book One: We Will Endeavor

By Robert Duncan 1919–1988 Robert Duncan

[De Vulgari Eloquentia, I,I]

“We will endeavor,

the word aiding us from Heaven,

to be of service

to the vernacular speech”

—from “Heaven” these

“draughts of the sweetest honey-milk”,

si dolcemente

from the language we first heard

endearments whisperings

infant song and revery

a world we wanted to go out into,

to come to ourselves into,

organizations in the sound of them

verging upon meaning,

upon “Heaven”,

hermetic talk

into which my range of understandings

was to grow for love of it

portents

and adults expounding

controversial doctrines, personal

science fictions and

rules of order,

but our own

“is that which we acquire without

any rule” for love of it

“imitating our nurses”

Robert Duncan, “from Dante Études, Book One: We Will Endeavor” from Ground Work: Before the War / In the Dark. Copyright © 1984 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: Ground Work: Before the War / In the Dark (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1984)

Biography

Described by Kenneth Rexroth as “one of the most accomplished, one of the most influential” of the postwar American poets, Robert Duncan was an important part of both the Black Mountain school of poetry, led by Charles Olson, and the San Francisco Renaissance, whose other members included poets Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser. A distinctive voice in American poetry, Duncan’s idiosyncratic poetics drew on myth, occultism, . . .

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