He was raised in Bakersfield, California, where his adopted father was an architect. His grandmother had been an elder in a Hermetic order similar to William Butler Yeats's Order of the Golden Dawn. The tales told and read to him as a child by his parents and the appropriately named Aunt Fay (the theosophists' world was marked by correspondences) were as lasting and important as any later influences and establish a constant world of reference in the poems. Duncan grew into a spiritualist who looked on experiences in the world as keys to be read and deciphered for hidden mysteries inherent in them. Spiritualist Madam Helena Petrovna Blavatsky played as important a part in his later life as she did earlier in the lives of the members of his adopted family. Edna Keough, his high school English teacher, revealed the world of poetry to him first through the work of the American poet H. D. He explained later: "She saw poetry not as cultural commodity or an exercise to improve sensibility, but as a vital process of the spirit." By the time he was eighteen he had already taken the orders, accepted poetry as his commitment for life: "I recognized in poetry my sole and ruling vocation."
Duncan attended the University of California at Berkeley for two years from 1936 to 1938, publishing his first poems in school magazines, before leaving for New York, where he became part of the circle of Anaïs Nin that included Kenneth Patchen, Henry Miller, and British poet George Barker.
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