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| The H.D. Book
ISBN: 9780520948020
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Poetry Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Theory etc.;
Duncan's (1919-1988) great meditation on modernism's last remaining question mark finally sees print. Published as the first volume in California's Collected Writings of Robert Duncan series, this lovingly prepared volume presents this long critical work, written in 1960 and 1961, in its full form for the first time. It brilliantly reconstructs the dynamics of Pound, Williams, and H.D.'s complex, charged, evolving poet relations, and of H.D.'s eventual departure from the modernist mainstream into a classicism that exasperated Williams, but clearly fascinates Duncan. It reveals Duncan's own poetic relationship to H.D., with whom he corresponded late in the latter poet's life. It tracks a canonical murder, by which critics (beginning with Randall Jarrell) systematically exclude H.D. from the modernist pantheon. And it shows Duncan, whose great longer works lay ahead of him, struggling to find a poetic kernel within H.D.'s oeuvre. While this book is staged as an elaborate defense of H.D.'s work, and especially her austere and archaic-seeming late poetry, it is best read as the daybook of a poet as he absorbs, thinks through, departs from, returns to, and loves a major antecedent. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
A leading poet of the San Francisco renaissance, Robert Duncan is a member of the international avant-garde. Born in Oakland, California, he has been an editor, a teacher at Black Mountain College and assistant director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State College. Highly regarded by fellow nonacademic poets, Duncan's poetry is at once learned and spontaneous. Its form seems at once innate and wrought, complex, and wonderfully musical. He received the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize (1960),a Guggenheim Memorial Award (1963), the Levinson Poetry Prize (1964), a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1967), and the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize (1967). After a self-imposed silence of many years, Duncan published a challenging volume in 1984, The Ground Work, a book he designed himself. He continues to be one of the chief advocates for the poem as "wisdom literature" and not just personal expression or artifact. (Bowker Author Biography) |
