(1919–1988)

(Born Edward Howard Duncan; has also written under the pseudonyms Robert Edward Duncan and Robert Edward Symmes) American poet, playwright, and essayist.

An important member of the San Francisco Bay poetry community, Duncan also is often identified as a Black Mountain poet. His writing is highly intertextual, referring to large numbers of other literary texts and even to other art forms, such as painting, music, and dance. Stylistically, Duncan’s work is characterized by mixtures of poetry and prose, unconventional syntax and punctuation, odd line breaks, and verse that begins with lower case letters or semicolons. Duncan is associated with the Beat Generation writers through their admiration for his confessional tone, his questioning of social as well as literary norms, and through Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s publication of his Selected Poems (1959).

Biographical Information

Duncan was born January 7, 1919, in Oakland, California, to Edward Howard, a...