Robert Duncan: The H. I FIND MYSELF looking back, across forty years, at an episode of American poetry which at one time seemed to be the answer to everything, and in which three poets in particular, conceived works of immense and unprecedented ambition, whose purpose was to transform human consciousness completely, to re-form and re-think the world from top to bottom: history, society, culture, politics, perception, language, religion⦠everything was cast into the cauldron to undergo total change.
The world was to be set right at last, and through poetry. They were not the only ones and it was not an exclusively American ambition; indeed it remains for some the ultimate purpose of poetry here and now, while to others it transgresses entirely the legitimate bounds of poetry by making it a substitute religion which also happens to be full of politically unacceptable habits of mind.
Nothing like the global scope of address would be attempted now except in coded and cryptic forms, and the grandiloquence of manner is unthinkable. The knowledge and learning then seen as integral to the role of the poet have been largely eradicated β what would a creative writing class teach you about economics and Egyptology?
Compared with these pseudo-epic performances most contemporary British and American poetry remains small-scale, concerned with the symptoms and paradoxes of existence, including the contradictions and hypocrisies of power.
Another view of these global exercises is that they were the late work of poets who, having written a lot of at least interesting poetry, decided in their seniority that they had a mission to transmit messages and visions of the greatest importance to humanity, at which the interestingness evaporated in a mass of pulpit rhetoric and obfuscation.
