In Bending the Bow, Robert Duncan is writing on a scale which places him among the poets, after Walt Whitman, bold enough to attempt the personal epic, the large-canvas rendering of man’s spirit in history as one man sees it, feels it, lives it, and makes it his own. In "Structures of Rime," the open series begun in The Opening of the Field and continued in this volume, Duncan works with ideas, forces, and persons created in language itself––the life and identity of the poet in the poem. With the first thirty poems of "Passages," which form the structural base in Bending the Bow, he has begun a second open series––a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound’s Cantos, Williams’s Paterson, Zukofsky’s “A,” and Olson’s Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of Bending the Bow emphasizes Duncan’s belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine’s Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimeres enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam’s Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems––"My Mother Would Be a Falconress," "A Shrine to Ameinias," and "Epilogos"––among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as "Up Rising" and "The Soldiers" are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience.

Bending the bow

Literature & Fiction

Duncan, Robert Edward

Poetry

CAPE.

Octavio, marbled gray paper covered boards backed with a white cloth spine, titled in gilt on the spine, in a pictorial orange & brown dust wrapper.

Roots and Branches

JONATHAN CAPE.

Ground Work: Before the War

first of two volumes of the poet's last work

Ground work: Before the war

New Directions Pub. Corp

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

A collection of poetry includes explorations of themes such as love, death, war, childhood, and memory

Ground work : before the war

Fictive Certainties

New Directions

From Publishers Weekly\nWhile Duncan has long been admired among poets, particularly the iconoclastic school that traces its "New American" lineage from Whitman to Pound to Olsen, he is little known by the general public. On first glance at the intriguing titles of the essays collected here"The Truth and Life of Myth," "The Sweetness and Greatness of Dante," "The Self in Postmodern Poetry"one anticipates revelations. But, sad to say, the essays are turgid and tedious, however erudite. Duncan's attempt to create his own mythopoetics is ambitious, but his poetics ineluctably reminds us of the the simpler, more straightforward documents of Keats, Wordsworth and Eliotwhose ideas have provided the foundation for modern poetryand Duncan seems anemic in comparison. While these essays provide several points of reference for reading the poet's own work, they don't deliver the insights they promise. November 
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

History & Criticism

Selected Poems

A collection of poetry deals with such topics as love, death, revelation, religion, humanity, and war

Bertholf, Robert J.

A collection of poetry deals with such topics as love, death, revelation, religion, humanity, and war

Hardcover. First Edition. Very good condition. From the collection of poet Gavin Ewart, with his name penned on F.E.P., and dated March 1968. In unclipped dust jacket. Pages and text fine. RB

The first decade: Selected poems 1940-1950

Fulcrum P

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Duncan, Robert Edward. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Duncan, Robert Edward

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Duncan, Robert Edward. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Bending the bow

Roots and Branches

Ground work: Before the war

Ground Work: Before the War

Ground work : before the war

Fictive Certainties

Fictive Certainties

Selected Poems

Selected Poems

The first decade: Selected poems 1940-1950