Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan was born in Oakland in 1919; his mother died in childbirth, and he was adopted by a couple of theosophists who chose him according to his astrological chart. A fall in the snow at the age of three left him with a squint. He left the University of California in 1938 and in 1944 published, in Dwight Macdonald's review, an essay in which he declared his homosexuality; a major review then withdrew a poem it had already accepted. He taught at Black Mountain College in 1956, lived for thirty-seven years with the painter Jess Collins, imposed on himself a fifteen-year publishing silence, and died in San Francisco in 1988.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryThe Opening of the FieldRobert Duncan · 1960Literature