Robert Duncan is a poet "in the American spirit," a traditionalist, as he himself clearly recognizes, with a remarkable affinity to the romanticism of Emerson and Whitman…. In the poetry and prose of Duncan one discovers Emerson's poet-priest inserted into the twentieth century, a poet who is one of Emerson's "representative men." (p. 308)

[As] early as 1954 Duncan realized that he was, in truth, an Emersonian, and proposed then that by enlarging the "vision of our genius" to include the relationship with Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne and Dickinson, "the full promise of our rebirth in Poetry would be released." The poet, as Duncan came to understand and to accept after a long personal struggle, takes his significance, not from himself alone, but also from the relationship to the poets of the past.

Duncan's capacity to assimilate ideas from other poets and writers caused him much anxiety and led him at...