The H.D. Book was not the only major critical project that occupied Robert Duncan’s attention in the 1960-63 timeframe, a period in which he was both in touch with Hilda Doolittle up until her death in the fall of 1961 and writing Roots and Branches, especially its second half "Windings." As had been the case with The Opening of the Field, which had undergone title and publisher changes prior to being issued, Duncan contemplated issuing this new as two shorter volumes, one with the Roots and Branches title, the second as Windings. Duncan was also working on what he took to be a major statement of poetics for The Nation, whose poetry editor at the time, Denise Levertov, had become one of his closest confidants. It’s not clear to me whether or not Levertov herself felt the article was too foggy-headed for The Nation or, more likely, that she couldn’t convince the old lefties who dominated its editorial board then as now, but "Ideas of the Meaning of Form" was never to appear in that magazine’s pages. Instead, it first showed up in mimeograph format for Warren Tallman’s classes at UBC in 1961, with a revised version appearing finally in Kulchur 4 that year.

"Ideas of the Meaning of Form," which now can be found in A Selected Prose (New Directions, 1995), reflects its roots as a piece intended for The Nation, as Duncan takes care to work in discussion of two poets – Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore – who had been close to that journal’s sense of itself as an aesthetic – as well as political – project over the years. Indeed, H.D. appears in it only in passing on its first page.

Instead of addressing "the problem" of H.D. – nobody much was taking her seriously in 1960 – Duncan attempts to make a tactical argument joined between two figures against whom he is anxious to stake out his opposition:

• An otherwise unidentified "Miss Drew (selected by me at random from a library recommended-currents shelf to represent up-to-date academic opinion about form in poetry)" – this presumably is Elizabeth Drew (1887-1965), author of Poetry: A Modern Guide to its Understanding & Discovering Poetry, as well as a study of T.S. Eliot and several other books. During her life, Drew taught at Smith and contributed to The New Yorker.
Cecil Hemley, whom Duncan dismisses casually as "a Cecil Hemley wishes that Donald Allen’s anthology had shown better taste…." Better known as the American translator for Isaac Bashevis Singer, Hemley did publish some books of his own poetry and was loosely associated with the Hall-Pack-Simpson crowd. The Poetry Society of America gives an annual award in his name. Hemley’s review appeared in The Hudson Review & was responded to by other New Americans, such as LeRoi Jones’ editorial in the second issue of Floating Bear.

The argument Duncan wishes to make is this: poetry fails when it seeks only to include the rational. By extension, this also suggests that the criticism of poetry must also fail that solely operates on a rational plane. Thus – although he doesn’t say this explicitly – his use of dream material, including dream dialogs with H.D. need to be understood as necessary components of a full study of her life & work.

Duncan is very much taking on the School of Quietude of his time here. His analysis that it fails not because the likes of Drew & Hemley are bad writers or lovers of mawkish verse, but that they live only by their conscious wits, and thus are only half alive. Thus Drew’s prescriptions for form are mechanistic and her ability to appreciate the best in modernism is incapacitated. He quotes her as follows:

"Pound’s cult of Imagism," Miss Drew goes on, "demanded no rhythmical stress at all, only a clear visual image in lines alleged to be in the pattern of the musical phrase. When read aloud, these pattern’s couldn’t possibly be distinguished from prose. The result was a flood of poems such as William Carlos Williams’ ‘The Red Wheelbarrow,’ which proves perhaps only that words can’t take the place of paint."

Duncan’s immediate response is that "It is of the essence of the rationalist persuasion that we be protected by the magic of what reasonable men agree is right, against unreasonable or upsetting information." He goes on to perform a close reading of "Wheelbarrows," proving her factually wrong in addition to her failures of spirit, then segues into his readings of Moore and Lowell, showing Moore represents the best of what is possible in a rationalist writing*, but that both also incorporate elements beyond reason in what Duncan terms to be their finest work. Negative capability is precisely the capacity to incorporate the extra-rational.

Fact and reason are creations of man’s genius to secure a point of view protected against a vision of life where information and intelligence invade us, where what we know shapes us and we become creatures, not rulers, of what is. Where, more, we are part of the creative process, not its goal. It was against such intolerable realizations that these men took thought. The rationalist gardener’s art is his control over nature, and beauty is conceived as the imposed order visible in the pruned hedgerow and the ultimate tree compelled into geometric globe or pyramid that gives certainty of effect.

Against Hemley, Duncan adds:

What form is to the conventional mind is just what can be imposed, the rest is thought of as lacking in form. Taste can be imposed, but love and knowledge are conditions that life imposes upon us if we would come into her meldoies. It is taste that holds out against feeling, originality that tries to hold out against origins. For taste is all original all individual arbitration.

This clearly is the Duncan of Derivations, one whose first movement toward that meadow of the mind is figured as a return, as permission.

Duncan’s equation – that the School of Quietude = rationalism – will betray him more than a decade later when a group of younger writers, conversant in theory but without any surface rhetoric of mysticism, take up the tradition of which Duncan himself was a part. He perceives – misperceives, really – their interest in linguistics, politicals, literary history & theory as a kind of rationalist revival. This must have seemed especially galling, particularly alongside his own inability to bring The H.D. Book to any conclusion.

But if The H.D. Book fails precisely because Duncan cannot make his discourse – this union of theosophy, psychology & poetics – equal to the evolution of theory beyond the modernist thinkers he originally posed himself against, and because he cannot erect an imagined H.D. to stand against what was not foreseen, he might have, instead, looked to this new generation with something more of the benign neglect that enabled him to work alongside the likes of Jack Spicer, a writer who, like Duncan, understood the importance & power of the extra-rational, but who, unlike Duncan the theosophist (or H.D. the Moravian), lacked an inherited vocabulary through which to imaginatively organize it & so constructed one of his own out of radios, Martians & the San Francisco Giants.

Nor, for that matter, did Duncan ever address, in The H.D. Book or elsewhere, the question once posed by Louis Zukofsky, that of a "scientific" definition of poetry. If anything, The H.D. Book itself appears as an argument against this possibility, yet as Duncan himself seems only occasionally to have understood – following Freud – science & the irrational need not be opposed possibilities. The difficulty that Duncan seems finally unable to address is which might incorporate the other & what might happen if the process were in any way reciprocal. Unless qualified otherwise, science in The H.D. Book always means instrumentalism. For Duncan, the Age of Reason was, in fact, a time of forgetting:

Conventional poetics, which belongs to the Age of Reason that sought to reduce even religion to a consensus of the opinion of reasonable men, had reduced the frame of mind to exclude the supernatural from individual experience, to rationalize genius and make a metaphor of inspiration, to confine reality to what, as Dryden has it in his Preface to All For Love; "all reasonable men have long since concluded." In philosophy, in poetics, in science, and in politics, men strove to make and to hold a world of sense, practical knowledge, ideal relations, logical conclusions, around which what Freud calls the Super-Ego, grown enormous, built its authority, against an enemy world of the irrational —fearful, to be avoided or rendered harmless—the world of fictions (romance, supernatural, vision and dream), of "sheer madness and vagary." Howling hairy madmen and shrieking desolate virgins appeared in the imaginations of Fuseli, Blake, Goya, Hoffman, Potocki, the Marquis de Sade.

The challenge of course to this view, from Duncan’s own perspective, had to be Freud’s Future of an Illusion and it is telling that in The H.D. Book the actual word science occurs most often in two discussions – the first the career of Madame Blavatsky, the second surrounding this book of Freud’s. Duncan takes pains to qualify it, to set the volume aside from the Freudian canon he otherwise wants to claim:

The Future of an Illusion is the book of a haunted mind, of a man divided against himself. "Certainly this is true of the man into whom you have instilled the sweet or bitter-sweet poison from childhood on." But this man is Freud himself, the man who followed his genius, his Sigmund, to lay bare the incest-wish in the psyche, his life work with dream and play, his obsession with the City of God or Rome. "But what of the other, who has been brought up soberly?" he asks. This man is that other person of Freud, who lays down the conditions under which dreams and play can come into the question at all. There was truth, William James saw, in the worlds of fiction—it was the truth of religion and poetry in one. But for Freud that truth might be various was at times intolerable. It was his lasting communication that the heroic struggle for the reality principle took place in the earliest years. In the little scene some intolerable action takes place: the beloved Nurse is banished, the child surrenders childish things and undertakes his father’s ways. But the "prehistoric old woman" that Freud tells us was ugly too is still to be banished from the thoughts of the Master in his seventy-first year. It was never to be done; the father was never entirely to win over the child in Freud. He wrote to Ferenczi while The Future of an Illusion was still in press: "Now it already seems to me childish; fundamentally I think otherwise; I regard it as weak analytically and inadequate as a self-confession." The dramatic fiction remained, the ‘As If’ reality could not be dismissed.

The irony here is unmistakable, for one might write just as easily that The H.D. Book is the book of a haunted mind, of a man divided against himself. In the same moment, it is the project that empowered Robert Duncan to create his finest works of poetry, especially Roots and Branches & Bending the Bow. It represents a deep meditation on the nature of poetry to person, as well as a history not just of modernism but of the intellectual tendencies that contested throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It is both beautifully & powerfully written, even though Duncan cannot, finally, make the splendor cohere.

* Duncan does this again, at greater length & far more effectively, in The H.D. Book. Moore, from his perspective is the non-pejorative example of inorganic form, yet inorganic nonetheless, even when Duncan finds her use of the stanza to be very much like the growth of crystals.