Radical Law: Anarchism & Myth in the Poetry of Robert Duncan Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Featherston, Daniel Rex Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 03/10/2021 00:35:49 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/195774 RADICAL LAW: ANARCHISM & MYTH IN THE POETRY OF ROBERT DUNCAN by Daniel Rex Featherston –––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Copyright Daniel Rex Featherston 2006 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2006 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Daniel Rex Featherston entitled "Radical Law: Anarchism & Myth in the Poetry of Robert Duncan" and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _______________________________________________________________________ Date: April 14, 2006 Tenney Nathanson _______________________________________________________________________ Date: April 14, 2006 Susan Aiken _______________________________________________________________________ Date: April 14, 2006 Roger Bowen Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. ________________________________________________ Date: April 14, 2006 Dissertation Director: Tenney Nathanson 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. Daniel Rex Featherston 4 For Rachel 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………7 INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………….8 Freedom and Power: Two Anarchist Anecdotes…………………………………..8 Anarchist Culture………………………………………………………………...16 A Radical Traditionalism: Robert Duncan's Mytho-Anarchist Poetic……………..25 Arkhe/Arkhos………………………………………………………………….…38 Anarchism and the Political Uncanny…………………………………………….50 I. "BEYOND THE INCOMPARABLE NATION:" ROBERT DUNCAN AND PETER KROPOTKIN…………………………………………………………….60 II. A PLACE OF FIRST PERMISSION: ROBERT DUNCAN'S ATLANTIS DREAM……………………………………………………………………………94 Atlantis………………………………………………………………………….100 The Atlantis Dream……………………………………………………………..103 Dream-Work……………………………………………………………………107 Eleusis…………………………………………………………………………..120 Myesis and Epopteia……………………………………………………………….124 III. HORTUS INCLUSUS: ROBERT DUNCAN'S "OFTEN I AM PERMITTED TO RETURN TO A MEADOW"………………………………………………...128 Hortus Recursus…………………………………………………………………...143 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………....160 NOTES……………………………………………………………………………162 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS–Continued WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………….168 7 ABSTRACT Radical Law: Anarchism & Myth in the Poetry of Robert Duncan investigates the relationship between religious and political radicalism in the poetry and poetics of San Francisco Renaissance poet Robert Duncan (1919–1988). I argue that Duncan draws on a nexus of religious and political "heresies" (e.g., Gnosticism, anarchism) to create a complex ethical vision of individual freedom and communal interdependence, what the poet called a "symposium of the whole." As my argument demonstrates, Robert Duncan's mytho- anarchism serves as a critique of twentieth-century political ideology, as well as the cultural politics of such precursors and contemporaries as Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and Denise Levertov 8 INTRODUCTION Mysteries are intrinsically esoteric, and as such are an offense to democracy. Democratic resentment denies that there can be anything that can't be seen by everybody; in the democratic academy truth is subject to public verification; truth is what any fool can see. –N.O. Brown, Apocalypse &/or Metamorphosis, 3 No conception of anarchism is further from the truth than that which regards it as an extreme form of democracy. Democracy advocates the sovereignty of the people. Anarchism advocates the sovereignty of the person. –George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, 33 Freedom and Power: Two Anarchist Anecdotes In his study of Moby-Dick, Charles Olson famously declares space "central fact to man born in America" (Collected 17). "To Melville," Olson writes, "it was not the will to be free but the will to overwhelm nature that lies at the bottom of [America] as individuals and a people. Ahab is no democrat. Moby-Dick, antagonist, is only king of natural force, resource" (17). For Olson, it is not Whitman but Melville who is "the truer man. He lived intensely his people's wrongs, their guilt. But he remembered the first dream. The White Whale is more accurate than Leaves of Grass. Because it is America, all of her space, the malice, the root" (20). 9 Moby-Dick appeared in 1851. That same year, Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin was writing his Confession to Tsar Nicholas from a prison cell inside Peter-and-Paul fortress. He, too, was thinking about American space: if there was egotism in me, it consisted solely in a need for movement, in a need for activity. There was always a basic defect in my nature: a love for the fantastic, for unusual, unheard-of adventures, for undertakings that open up a boundless horizon and whose end no one can foresee. I should have been born somewhere in the forests of America, among the Western colonists, there where civilization has scarcely dawned and where all life is a ceaseless struggle against wild men, wild nature, and not in an organized civil society. Also, had my fate wished to make me a sailor in my youth, I even now would probably be a very respectable man; I would not have thought of politics and would have sought no other adventures and storms than those of the sea. (Bakunin 92) A decade later, Bakunin visited America. After a brief stay in San Francisco, he traveled by way of Panama to New York and Boston. Bakunin never saw the interior of America, nor did he mingle with the "Western colonists." Instead, as anarchist historian Paul Avrich writes, the future father of the modern anarchist movement spent most of his time within the "organized civil society" of America's eastern seaboard, hobnobbing among "men of liberal temperament and advanced social and political views who favored growth of democracy and national independence from Europe" (19). Surrounded by progressive politicians and professionals, Bakunin's two-month visit to the United States would leave 10 "no discernible imprint on the revolutionary and working-class movements, then in an embryonic phase of development" (26). As Avrich notes, Bakunin's impressions of America were mixed: Looking back at his American sojourn, Bakunin recalled a society in which workers never starved and were "better paid" than their European counterparts. "Class antagonism," he wrote, "hardly yet exists," for "all workers are citizens," part of a "single body politic," and education is "widespread among the masses." These benefits, he said, were rooted in "the traditional spirit of liberty" that the first colonists had imported from England and along with the principle of "individual independence and communal and provincial self government," had transplanted into a wilderness that was free from "the obsession of the past." (23) There was also much to criticize about the United States, including its materialism, nationalism, and representative democracy in which "the masses are 'sovereign in law, not in fact'" (25). By 1873, Bakunin would observe "that the United States is 'run by a special, thoroughly bourgeois class of so-called politicians or political leaders, while the mass of workers live under conditions just as cramped and wretched as in monarchic states'" (25). These later comments do not cancel out the America of the Confession. Combined, they propose a twofold vision of a nation in rapid transition. Among other things, the America of Bakunin's Confession reflects the receding vision of an agrarian society "where civilization has scarcely dawned." It is America's "wild nature" as the erasure of political space and its temporal correlative: "the obsession of the past." Bakunin's later writings 11 reflect such influences on American society as mass immigration, westward expansion, industrialization, and civil war. As Olson writes, it is a dark vision of America, "all of her space, the malice, the root." Of course, the imagined America of Bakunin's Confession was never free from politics and history. At best, it is a romantic misreading of America from the solitary confinement of a Russian prison cell.i Although Bakunin would become a leading figure in