Robert Duncan’s model of the older poet as someone who takes on “in the last years of their lives, a major creative phase” is worth exploring. When Duncan makes this claim in The H.D. Book in 1960, he names three of his five favored modernist master poets – Pound, Williams & H.D. – as instances of this phenomenon.

  Was it that the war—the bombardment for H.D., the imprisonment and exposure to the elements for Ezra Pound, the divorce in the speech for Williams—touched a spring of passionate feeling in the poet that was not the war but was his age, his ripeness in life. They were almost “old”; under fire to come “to a new distinction.”

  A “major creative phase” is the first criterion then. But the second & at least as important is “a spring of passionate feeling.” What then of Duncan’s other two poetic masters, Gertrude Stein & Louis Zukofsky?

  Fifteen years Duncan’s senior, Zukofsky in 1960 is 56, right within the age range Robert identifies for his “last years” model. In 1960, Zukofsky is not only less well known than Duncan, but it is Duncan who appears to have arranged for Zukofsky’s 1958 visiting job at San Francisco State. Further, Zukofsky in 1960 hasn’t written a section of “A” since completing “A”-12 nine years earlier. The 1950s instead have been a period in which Zukofsky has focused primarily on a long critical project not unlike The H.D. Book – Bottom: On Shakespeare.

  Between 1960 & ’67, Zukofsky will return to “A,” composing nine sections, a period of white-hot creativity considering the 23 years it had taken him to write the first twelve sections. Then Zukofsky goes quiet again, with only Celia’s 1968 collage of “A”-24 to punctuate the silence. After a three-year silence – modest compared with the 1950s or the eight-year hiatus that took place between the two halves of “A”-9 in the 1940s – Zukofsky returns again to the project, writing what many poets in my own generation take to be the two finest sections of “A,” 22 & 23,* completing the poem 46 years after it had been begun. In the last four years of his life, Zukofsky then writes 80 Flowers, a shorter & more lyrical project, but one that partakes of the intense opacity that first characterizes “A”-22 & 23. At the time of his death, there were apparently notes toward a further project, 90 Trees, that never got written.* Zukofsky might appear to bear out Duncan’s theory – indeed, it offers different works that could be taken as “proof,” suggesting that, as a theory, Duncan’s own formula just might be too general. Yet the answer will depend very directly on the question of which, if any, of these works might best be characterized as “a spring of passionate feeling.”

  My own sense is that “major creative phase” means not merely the composition of one or more important works, but works that diverge or extend our understanding of the project of the poet, the way The Pisan Cantos transform an epic that was heading toward a leaden conclusion betwixt Van Buren & Pound’s own brand of voodoo economics, or the way H.D. breaks free as a poet from the constraints of the imagist framework others had envisioned for her (even if she had left that stage of her writing behind by 1920, spending much of the between wars period writing mostly unpublished & perhaps unpublishable novels). But if transformation is a requirement, then the second half of “A” – or even the works of “An” starting with “A”-14 don’t really qualify, tho “A”-22-23 certainly would.

  The situation with Stein seems even curiouser. Stein is, in certain respects, almost the perfect example of a modernist who both took on a major new phase in her work later in life precisely by tackling the personal in her writing – and this process made her famous. In writing the history of her partnership, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas made it possible for Stein to extend her distinctive methodology – as a style – to a truly populist genre & in so doing to create a crossover publishing success unequaled among the high modernists.

  But Autobiography is a book Duncan never once mentions in The H.D. Book, even tho Stein herself shows up on 16 occasions. This is doubly worth noting because in the 1950s & early ‘60s, really until Jerome Rothenberg arrived to take up championing her work as well, Duncan was literally the lone advocate Stein had among American poets. A title such as Writing Writing is not even imaginable without her work. Yet as Duncan sits down to contemplate the project of an older poet as a model for the next stage of his work, the most popular avant-garde writer (who also happens to be the most out-of-the-closet homosexual) of the previous half century warrants only a handful of mentions, compared with, for example, novelists such as Joyce (cited 64 times in the book) or Lawrence (99). Or, for that matter, Ezra Pound, mentioned over 400 times, nearly once per page. 

  Try to imagine a work on the modernists written today that would mention Pound 400 times for every 16 mentions of Stein, a ratio of 25:1 – it’s a good index of exactly how much literary reputations change in 40 years. 

  Duncan never to my knowledge writes of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas – virtually all of his actual quotations of Stein in any of his critical works come from her ten-page essay, “Composition as Explanation.” Certainly, her movement into this phase occurs before the war as well. Published first in 1933 – one year after Zukofsky’s Objectivist Anthology – Stein’s crossover hit occurs when Duncan is still just 14 years old. What this means in practical terms is that Stein for Duncan was always that woman who had written that work, who had become famous or infamous, depending on your perspective, who had achieved a notoriety as an egocentric memoirist as well as the creator of works of absolute opacity.

  Yet what separates Autobiography most from, say, The Pisan Cantos, Helen in Egypt or The Desert Music is not that they embody a “spring of passionate meaning” and Stein’s memoir does not, nor that they transform the project of the poet & it does not – The Autobiography does it more completely than any of these other three works – but rather that they are earnest where it is ironic. It may be odd for a writer who penned “Willingly I’ll say there’s been a sweet marriage” to bypass one of the first great presentations of a homosexual union, but I’ll wager that what keeps Duncan from connecting to Stein’s own “spring of passionate meaning” is what also kept him from a closer relationship to the first generation New York School – a discomfort on Duncan’s part with “camp.” Let alone the idea that one might produce great writing in this subversive discursive tone.

      * In the words on one langpo, “A”-22 & 23 “rescued” the project as a whole.  

** Causing some wags to suggest that, had Zukofsky lived long enough, he would have gotten around to 101 Dalmatians.