Since that time he has been at the heart of literary activity in the Bay Area--an enthusiastic supporter of younger poets and an enduring inspiration to his peers.
While sympathetic to the openly romantic stance and social iconoclasm of the Beats, Duncan has been more closely associated with the poets who gathered at North Carolina's Black Mountain College in the early 1950s. Basic to both Beat and Black Mountain aesthetics is the great romantic movement, felt more poignantly by writers of the postwar era as a salutary response to the then-reigning New Critical orthodoxy. Along with Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, Duncan helped to forge a poetics based on the writer's immediate--even physical--response to the environment. Charles Olson's call for a poetics of process and engagement, Robert Creeley's emphasis on psychological intensities, Allen Ginsberg's vatic, Blakean voice, Jack Kerouac's ideas of spontaneous prosody, and Gary Snyder's incorporation of atavistic, ethnopoetic materials are all part of a postmodern aesthetic within which Robert Duncan's work easily fits.
One of the crucial links between the Beats and other avant-garde movements during the 1950s was Kenneth Rexroth, who served as a liaison between modernists like William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound and the younger generation.
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