Radical Law: Anarchism & Myth in the Poetry of Robert Duncan

Abstract

Radical Law: Anarchism & Myth in the Poetry of Robert Duncan investigates the relationship between religious and political radicalism in the poetry and poetics of San Francisco Renaissance poet Robert Duncan (1919-1988). I argue that Duncan draws on a nexus of religious and political "heresies" (e.g., Gnosticism, anarchism) to create a complex ethical vision of individual freedom and communal interdependence, what the poet called a "symposium of the whole." As my argument demonstrates, Robert Duncan's mytho-anarchism serves as a critique of twentieth-century political ideology, as well as the cultural politics of such precursors and contemporaries as Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and Denise Levertov.