Duncan, Robert (Edward) (1919–1988)

US poet. A key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s (other poets include Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982), Gary Snyder, and Philip Lamantia (1927– ), he was also, after meeting the poet Charles Olson, an important member of the Black Mountain poets. His first major collection, The Opening of the Field (1960), was influenced by Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Olson. His politically radical and formally open-ended sequence ‘Passages’ appeared in Roots and Branches (1964), Bending the Bow (1968), and Ground Work: Before the War (1984).