Robert Duncan (poet)

Robert Edward Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988 ) was an American poet and a devotee of Hilda "H.D." Doolittle 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 poets of the New American Poetry and Black Mountain College.

Duncan saw his work as emerging especially from the tradition of Pound, Williams and Lawrence.

Duncan was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.

Not only a poet, but also a public intellectual, Duncan's presence was felt across many facets of popular culture.

Duncan's father was unable to afford him, so in 1920 he was adopted by Edwin and Minnehaha Symmes, a family of devout Theosophists.

They renamed him Robert Edward Symmes in honor of a family friend.

The family adopted a second child, Barbara Eleanor Symmes, in 1920.

She was born one year minus one day after Duncan, on January 6, 1920.

She also was selected under circumstances similar to that of her brother; her presence was expected to bring good karma into the family.

At age three, Duncan was injured in an accident on the snow that resulted in his becoming cross-eyed and seeing double.

In Roots and Branches, his second major book, he wrote: "I had the double reminder always, the vertical and horizontal displacement in vision that later became separated, specialized into a near and a far sight. One image to the right and above the other. Reach out and touch. Point to the one that is really there."

His name is prominent in the history of pre-Stonewall gay culture and in the emergence of bohemian socialist communities of the 1930s and '40s, in the Beat Generation, and also in the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s, influencing occult and gnostic circles of the time.

During the later part of his life, Duncan's work, published by City Lights and New Directions, came to be distributed worldwide, and his influence as a poet is evident today in both mainstream and avant-garde writing.

Duncan was born in Oakland, California, as Edward Howard Duncan Jr. His mother, Marguerite Pearl Duncan, had died in his childbirth.

He was her tenth child and the delivery was at home to avoid the risks of contracting the so-called Spanish influenza at a medical facility.

After the death of his adopted father in 1936, Duncan started studying at the University of California, Berkeley.

He began writing poems inspired in part by his left wing politics and acquired a reputation as a bohemian.

His friends and influences included Mary and Lilli Fabilli, Virginia Admiral, and Pauline Kael, among others.

He thrived as storyteller, poet, and fledgling bohemian, but by his sophomore year he had begun to drop classes and had quit attending obligatory military drills.

In 1938, he briefly attended Black Mountain College, but left after a dispute with faculty over the Spanish Civil War.

He spent two years in Philadelphia and then moved to Woodstock, New York to join a commune run by James Cooney, where he worked on Cooney's magazine The Phoenix and met both Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.

In 1938, while a sophomore at Berkeley, Duncan met graduate student Ned Fahs at a dance, and the two entered into Duncan's first recorded homosexual relationship, which biographer Ekbert Faas describes as "marriage-like".

When Fahs graduated, Duncan followed him to Philadelphia, and the couple lived together first there and then in New York.

They lived separately while Duncan attended Black Mountain College; by 1940, they were living together again, in Annapolis.

It was only after a psychiatric discharge from the army in 1941 that he formed the composite of his previous names and became Robert Edward Duncan.

The Symmeses had begun planning for the child's arrival long prior to his adoption.

There were terms for his adoption that had to be met: he had to be born at the time and place appointed by the astrologers, his mother was to die shortly after giving birth, and he was to be of Anglo-Saxon Protestant descent.

His childhood was stable, and his parents were popular and social members of their community—Edwin was a prominent architect and Minnehaha devoted much of her time to volunteering and serving on committees.

He grew up surrounded by the occult in one form or another; he was well aware of the circumstances of his fated birth and adoption and his parents carefully interpreted his dreams.

The relationship ended not long after, and Fahs married a woman in 1941.

Duncan continued to write poetry about Fahs for another twenty years.

In 1941 Duncan was drafted and declared his homosexuality to get discharged.

In 1943, he had his first heterosexual relationship, which ended in a short, disastrous marriage.

In 1944 Duncan had a relationship with the abstract expressionist painter Robert De Niro Sr.

Duncan's name figures prominently in the history of pre-Stonewall gay culture.

In 1944, Duncan wrote the landmark essay The Homosexual in Society.

The essay, in which Duncan compared the plight of homosexuals with that of African Americans and Jews, was published in Dwight Macdonald's journal politics.

Duncan's essay is considered a pioneering treatise on the experience of homosexuals in American society given its appearance a full decade before any organized gay rights movement (Mattachine Society).

It made Duncan the first prominent American to reveal his homosexuality.