Groundwork: Before the War/In the Dark [Paperback]

For Robert Duncan...the poem is a universe in itself, and a soul... Robert Duncan's work has for decades been a recurrent testimony and reminder that poetry had to do with music, with vision, with the live of the soulnot to the exclusion of all else, or indeed of anything, but on the contrary as ground and environing air for whatever the range of experience may be. Duncan believes in the demiurgic powers of poetry, restoring to it a kind of authority it has not had in a long time...One would have to go back to Dante to find such belief in angels. The angels that Rilke doubted are there for Duncan to converse with. The poetic tradition that Duncan invokes is necessarily hereticalpolitically, sexually, and poeticallyone which sees 'always under the side turning' in a search for the fullest definition of social order.?