Robert Duncan, in writing to H.D. during the last two years of her life, sought to connect himself to the generation of Imagism (which was, as Duncan would note in The H.D. Book, "not a lost generation," those writers who came into prominence in Paris in the 1920s, precisely because Imagism had been the last pre-Great War poetic tendency*) to help him craft his own master work, a project that, in The H.D. Book, he repeatedly associates with the major late poems of Pound, Williams and H.D.

Yet Duncan’s own writing from this point onward cannot honestly be said to echo the strategies taken by any of the trio of elder poets to whom he continually returns – there is no Patterson, no Trilogy, no Pisan Cantos, as such. One can read Duncan’s major work, beginning with The Opening of the Field in a couple of different ways. In one, all five books might be read & understood as a single project. In another, the fifteen year hiatus between Bending the Bow & the first volume of Ground Work figures a break – placing the trio of volumes from the sixties & seventies into one group, the two volumes of Ground Work into a second. While that may be a major issue for Duncan scholarship in general, it doesn’t, I think, impact a great deal on this work’s relationship to The H.D. Book as currently available – either in the journals of its original publication nor in the pirated "Frontier Press" edition that pops up periodically on the internet. The H.D. Book as we have it was written almost entirely in the 1960s, prior to the hiatus – and the latest actual reference I can find internally to another publication is 1969. While Duncan is known to have had notes to a third "book," to accompany the two sections already available, there is apparently no such additional manuscript extant. All of which suggests to me that we should focus our concentration on the relationship of the Book to the trio of projects Duncan was writing before and during its composition – The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, & Bending the Bow.

Opening was written before Duncan’s correspondence with H.D. got serious. He had sent a few letters earlier, as early as 1950 – a time when his earlier attempts to connect with Pound (a visit to St. Elizabeth’s in 1947, followed by correspondence) had, by Duncan’s own account, become entropic, tapering into silence. The Field, as Duncan called it when he sent Doolittle a copy of the manuscript, was written thus also before Duncan undertook his "study" of the elder poet.

Duncan had been working on this first book of his new unnamed project for some time. Peter O’Leary, in an email, places the first draft of Opening’s initial poem, "Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," as from "a trip to London in 1953." The care with which the volume was not only composed, but prepared for public acceptance, as well as Duncan’s own down playing of his earlier works, suggest the considerable importance that Duncan assigned to this project. Indeed, there was much back and forth over whether to self-publish the book or to place it with a press such as Macmillan – which would ensure a broader readership and force more of a response from the 1960s School of Quietude set. In the end, the book came out from Barney Rosset’s Grove Press, a press that had one foot in the New York trade scene, while the other published the likes of Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn, Henry Miller and William Burroughs.

Within the trio of Opening, Roots & Bow, there exist not one but two long poems – The Structure of Rime & Passages – numbered sequences that might well have been written and published as independent works, much like the Pisan Cantos or Olson’s Maximus. That Duncan never published them that way is telling – the two projects treated independently might well have greatly enhanced Duncan’s reputation and, I believe, Structure’s revolutionary nature – it was in the 1960s the most radical instance of the prose poem in English after William’s Kora in Hell & the works of Gertrude Stein – is more clearly visible when set apart. But Duncan’s view of poetry, much like Duncan’s view of the world, is that it needed to be understood as organic, that there is a structure, larger, more detailed, more complex than we can can derive from details alone. As he will say (writing of Olson) in The H.D. Book, "Structure is not satisfied in the molecule, is not additive; but is fulfilled only in the whole work." If one burning question concerning the American longpoem during its modernist period lay precisely in the crux of the part:whole relationship – with Pound, Williams & even H.D. (tho here we might come back to note differences) all writing numbered works that largely flow one into the other, with Zukofsky envisioned here as the Great Dissenter, at least after the opening six sections of "A, " insisting instead a part:whole relationship that stresses the integrity of the part, Duncan offers instead a third way, reminiscent almost of Whitman’s ongoing growth of Leaves of Grass through perpetual revision across multiple editions. In Opening, Roots & Bow, we find individual named poems commingled with these two long poems to form a continuous writing, a Life Work, to employ Duncan’s phrase (and his caps). It is within this commingled flow that we first find The Structure of Rime. Indeed, the structure of The Field forces us to focus on its critical role. After an initial trio of poems, "Meadow," "The Dance," and "The Law I Love is Major Mover," come the first two sections of Rime. Then follows by no accident "A Poem Slow Beginning," followed in turn by five more sections of Rime.

* Tho one might argue that William Carlos Williams, a late starter as well as The One Who Did Not Move to Europe, did not reach maturity as a poet until the 1920s.