Duncan's Romanticism

Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics blog has posted an article by Michael Palmer, first published in 1997, reminiscing on his relationship with Robert Duncan's poetry. He begins by suggesting that Duncan's work is firmly rooted in a Romantic tradition, and in opposition to the both the formalist work dominant at the time, and to the supposed impersonality of some modernist texts:

Duncan's project can be seen in part as an effort to make place once again for the artifice, affect, and lore modernism had repressed. However, this was achieved not in reaction against modernism (and certainly not for the sake of decor), but as an extension of its exploratory impulse and a reading or revealing of its progressive, Romantic philosophical and aesthetic origins.

In fact, Palmer sees Duncan's Romanticism as an sort of polemical stance, part of the larger "distubance" of his work and life practices, which functions to un-moor its audience's relationship to their own aesthetic positions:

At Vancouver, in the freewheeling discussions with Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and Margaret Avison, Duncan would continually queer the pitch. Into a consideration of projective verse, he would introduce Mallarmé; at the mention of Whitehead's Process and Reality, he might offer Boehme, William Carlos Williams, Edith Sitwell; to Ginsberg's proposition of "spontaneous bop prosody" he would counter with the "Law we are given to follow." Thus, even among sympathetic peers (though Ginsberg and Duncan were not often in sympathy), Duncan felt the need to assert the force of heretical opinion, which in turn for him was grounded in the authority of timeless heretical gnosis.