1A preeminent poet of the American post-war avant-garde, Robert Duncan was a frequent correspondent with many of the most significant poets and editors of his time, including Donald M. Allen, whose anthology The New American Poetry (1945 – 1960), would be one of the most important American poetry anthologies of the twentieth century. But Duncan’s deserved literary reputation obscures the complexity of the tensions rampant in America as Cold War hysteria intensified during the 1950s. This essay clarifies Duncan’s role in the development of Allen’s hugely influential anthology and examines an epistolary exchange between poet and editor that sheds light on the political and social significance of The New American Poetry as well as the vulnerability Duncan felt as a homosexual poet during a particularly repressive period of American history known as the Lavender Scare (Johnson).
2Many accounts of the period – including Duncan’s – suggest that the poet played a central, defining role in the design and scope of The New American Poetry. According to Ron Silliman: “Listening to Duncan personally in San Francisco, on several occasions he made it sound as if Allen had been his grad student assistant” (Silliman). Yet Allen’s correspondence suggests otherwise, indicating that he considered Duncan more of a nuisance than an aide. Writing to Robert Creeley in August, 1959, Allen commented:
Duncan has been a considerable problem [...]. Were I to follow his directives (which change from day to day) I should end up with something close to Daisy Aldan’s Folder anthology. I have tried to compose the anthology as objectively as possible and continue to oppose those arguments from all sides which seem purely political to me. (Allen, 1959)
3Despite Allen’s reservations and the evident tension in much of his correspondence with Duncan, the poet was an important sounding board and source of information for the editor. Duncan took on the role of gatekeeper with Allen as early as 1956, objecting to Allen’s idea of including Gregory Corso in the San Francisco Scene issue of The Evergreen Review, then later complaining to Allen about the rate of payment for the anthology, asking for 50 cents per line rather than the $2.50 per page that Allen proposed, and also calling Allen’s idea of a “regional anthology [...] Strange” (Duncan, 1959). Allen ignored many of Duncan’s suggestions about the contents of the anthology, notably the poets Jeanne McGahey and Rosalie Moore, members of the Activist Group, whom Duncan suggested “would be necessary if the collection were to convey all the lively” movements in post-war American poetry (Duncan, 1956). Duncan’s role in recuperating female modernists seems at play here for younger women writers, but unfortunately these poets would not be included in The New American Poetry.
4More than simply filling out the details of the post-war poetic milieu, however, one exchange between Allen and Duncan definitively reshapes our understanding of The New American Poetry. On November 3, 1959, the day after Allen delivered the anthology to Grove Press, he wrote to Duncan:
The recurring theme of the anthology (it was only towards the end that I realized this was happening) is love or rather that enormous complex of themes; there are all the themes of lust, desire, hatred, longing, etc., but what profoundly distinguishes much of the New Poetry here from every other group of poets one could assemble from the contemporary scene strikes me as being: the community of love. Whether we (Olson’s the 200 that matter) love each other more today than before, than others have in earlier periods, I can’t say; but the work certainly shows a keener analysis of the elements of love and friendship. (Allen, 1959)
5“The community of love” is a phrase that points backward and forward at once – back to the radical 1930s, when it was used by the Catholic Worker Movement and left-leaning writers and thinkers, and even farther back to nineteenth century American communes and the work of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who used it to describe the community surrounding Jesus. The phrase also looks forward to the liberal sexual practices of the 1960s. But “the community of love” had a specifically political meaning in the 1950s, when its underlying features of collectivism and the abolishment of private property connoted communism. Kenneth Rexroth and Muriel Rukeyser, among other left-leaning poets, used the phrase repeatedly to refer to an alternative system of communal government in opposition to the democratic capitalism of Cold War America. So Allen’s use of the phrase to describe the anthology suggests this poetry is more engaged in politics than his introduction reveals. This will be further clarified by teasing out some of the connotations of the phrase “the community of love,” before focusing on a particular strand of meaning as it relates to Duncan and his relationship to the academy.
6The concept of the community of love, if not the exact phrase, was on the minds of several poets during the post-war period. Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California,” included in The New American Poetry, asks of Walt Whitman: “Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?” (Allen 1960, 182). Robert Creeley, writing his poem “For Love” in September 1960, just after the publication of Allen’s anthology, concluded: “Into the company of love / it all returns.” Rifkin shows how this echoes Hart Crane’s “The Broken Tower,” which declares the poet’s task “to trace the visionary company of love,” an allusion that gives a sense of completion to Creeley’s collection, which opens with an elegy for Crane. Rifkin also proposes a reading of these lines as “bespeaking the certainty of professional affirmation, a return on a decade’s careful investment, as much as the optimism of a new marriage” (69). In his initial letter to Duncan, Allen suggests Charles Olson as another post-war poet who was concerned with community, and Olson’s tenure at Black Mountain College put him at the center of one of the most significant creative communities of the period.
7Kenneth Rexroth gave his own colorful definition of the community of love as “the organic community of man” in an interview in 1959:
This doesn’t mean that it’s all a great gang fuck. In fact, it doesn’t have anything to do with that at all. It means that what holds a natural society together is an all-pervading Eros which is an extension and reflection, a multiple reflection, of the satisfactions which are eventually traced to the actual lover and beloved. Out of the union of the lover and the lover as the basic unit of society flares this whole community of love. Curiously enough, this is Hegelianism, particularly the neo-Hegelians who are the only people who ever envisaged a multiple absolute which was a community of love. (Rexroth 13-14)
8The intersection of physical love, public love and politics that Rexroth describes here resonates with much of the poetry in The New American Poetry, and his mention of Eros has important resonances in Duncan’s work as well. While Rexroth rightly cites Hegel as a source of the community of love, the phrase and concept are also significant in American culture.
9Peter Maurin, who was, with Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the leftist social group the Catholic Worker Movement, references the concept of “community” in several poems that add dimension to Allen’s use of the phrase while exemplifying Maurin’s radical Catholicism (2015). Religion has often, though not always, been important to the practice of the American community of love. A vast democratic community united by fellowship and common love is one of the central themes of the writing of Walt Whitman. In the mid-nineteenth century, many Americans would have associated the phrase with communities like Brook Farm and the Oneida Community, both of which had religious dimensions and were concurrent with Transcendentalism. Readers such as Rexroth, who were familiar with the writing of Hegel, however, would also have connected the phrase to Jesus.
10Hegel deals explicitly with the community of love in his early writings on Christianity, specifically “Christianity and its Fate” and a fragment called “Love.” In these essays, Hegel meditates on the formation of the Christian community around Jesus, detailing the social aspects of the movement, as well as its ultimate failure to realize The Kingdom of God on earth. For Hegel, The Kingdom of God was synonymous with the community of love:
A loving circle, a circle of hearts that have surrendered their rights against one another over anything their own, that are united solely by a common faith and hope, and whose pleasure and joy is simply the pure single-heartedness of love, is a Kingdom of God on a small scale. But its love is not religion. (Hegel 289)
11Hegel’s description of the community of love here clarifies its meaning. But the dual oppositions of powerful government and human nature virtually ensure the impossibility of realizing the community of love while relegating it to a minority of society, or as Allen writes in his introduction to The New American Poetry, “our avant-garde” (Allen 1960, xi).
12For Hegel, love is a unity between self and other. The community of love is the Kingdom of God, a community without private property. Hegel’s writings on love make this connection to property blatant, claiming that property “makes up such an important part of men’s life” that the community of love is unlikely to be realized (Hegel 307). His definition of lovers is “a multiplex opposition in the course of their multiplex acquisition and possession of property and rights” (300). This is the main challenge the community of love faced in the conservative America of the 1950s.
13The community of love for Hegel can only flourish when the individual cedes his importance to the group, when everything is shared and nothing is held back. It is thus in clear opposition to the democratic capitalism the United States promoted during the Cold War. The following quotes sum up the connection of love and property according to Hegel’s definition of the community of love:
Abolition of property, introduction of community of goods, common meals [...]. The essence of their group was (a) separation from men and (b) love for one another; (a) and (b) are necessarily bound together [...]. By love’s extension over a whole community its character changes; it ceases to be a living union of individualities and instead its enjoyment is restricted to the consciousness of their mutual love [...]. Love is indignant if part of the individual is severed and held back as a private property. (Hegel 286)
14Clearly there are connections between Hegel’s community of love and communism as a community of individuals who cede their individualism and property to the collective. This connotation would have been particularly provocative in Cold War America, as Kenneth Rexroth clearly understood.
15Rexroth posits the community of love as an anthropological fact found not just in Hegel’s study of the early Christian community, but also in Native American tribal culture. Elsewhere in the interview cited above, Rexroth suggests the community of love is the natural condition of mankind but has been eradicated by the ruling powers of American capitalist democracy who feel threatened because a community that is bound together this way cannot be controlled or commodified. In promoting the community of love Rexroth was in fact promoting an alternative system of governance.
16Despite the seemingly innocent nature of the phrase “the community of love,” in the climate of the Cold War America it suggested an alternative worldview which would have put those who used it in opposition to the country’s prevailing values. As Nixon’s kitchen debate with Khrushchev suggested, the increased commercialization of American culture during this period, as lower unemployment and lower costs of commodities saw the standard of living rising rapidly, was the trump card for the American capitalist system against communism (Bohanon 2016). Materialism was politicized and Rexroth unsurprisingly located the enemy of love not only in government but in commercialism. The state and state-sponsored capitalism employ what Rexroth called the social lie in order to maintain the status quo and to keep the population in check. For Duncan and poets like him in the late 1950s, that state organization included academia.
17On November 5, 1959, Duncan responded to Allen with a detailed analysis of the role of love, friendship and community in American poetry:
I have much the same thot [sic] that you have in your letter about the theme of love [...]. Academic verse (that is verse written by schoolteachers) specifically cannot deal with love at any depth that is disturbing to public respectability. But given that poets who are not public figures can afford to be intense in their sexual lives – i.e. can inherit the responsibilities of the romance tradition or of erotic ceremonies or sacraments. (Duncan, 1959)
18Duncan’s careful consideration of the theme of love, not just in Allen’s anthology but also regarding the larger context of contemporary poetry, suggests that the topic was significant. Interestingly, Duncan claims that attitudes toward love and a willingness to write intensely about sex distinguishes “poets who are not public figures” from those who teach, an important point that adds new dimensions to the era’s discussions about so-called academic poets.
19Allen’s anthology waded into an anxious debate about the writer-as-professor which reached its apogee in the late 1950s. The pages of literary journals after World War II were strewn with intellectual hand-wringing regarding the effect that the increasing number of poets and writers in the academy would have on American literature. As Charles A. Fenton wrote in his essay “The Writer as Professor” in 1955, “As a subject for debate and invective [...] this phenomenon of the writer as professor is now a fixed and recurrent one. It is, indeed, no longer a phenomenon; it is a fact” (Fenton 164). Similarly, in 1958, Louise Bogan would review the anthology The New Poets of England and America (1957), citing “a widespread belief that close contact with academic life is dangerous for the artist.” Duncan himself, writing in 1961, cited “a new class [...] of university instructors in the arts [...] and a particular academic culture:”
In music the twelve-tone system, in painting at the present time hand-me-downs from the abstract expressionism of the 40s and early 50s, and in poetry the urbane conventional poetry of Auden or more recently Wilbur. For this whole professional class, setting standards of taste and moderating the imagination are their historical destinies. (Duncan, 1961)
20The split between academic and avant-garde poetry was debated by individuals on both sides. But for Duncan and other gay poets and editors, the binary was more than theoretical.
21Allen’s anti-academic bias is clearly expressed in his introduction to The New American Poetry, where he writes that the shared characteristic of the poets therein is their “total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse” (Allen 1960, xi). What those qualities actually were is not established, as several critics have noted (Woznicki 156). Alan Golding has argued that “rather than an external and easily located ‘enemy,’ the academy stands metonymically for an internalized set of constraints operating on all New American poets” (Golding 204). Nonetheless, for homosexual poets including Duncan and at least a dozen others in The New American Poetry (Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Peter Orlovsky, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Jonathan Williams, James Broughton, Ebbe Borregaard, James Schuyler, Edward Field, and John Wieners) the academy was indeed an external enemy.
22Allen’s letter to Duncan only begins to suggest how The New American Poetry promotes opinions and lifestyles – both personal, social and political – that were considered subversive during the Cold War. At the same time, it distances the poems from the charges of arid impersonality that conservative critics commonly leveled against left-leaning poets of the period (Filreis 115). This sheds light on the complex ways The New American Poetry engages with Cold War politics. But most immediately, this exchange between two gay men during an especially repressive time and place that has been referred to as “homophobic America” (Thomson 5), where “to be out was a dangerous thing, and even gossip could ruin you” (Farago) merits a consideration of Allen’s use of the phrase “the community of love,” and Duncan’s response, in terms of homosexuality in Cold War politics and poetry.
23Duncan’s survey of what he refers to as sexual intensity in American poetry and the unwillingness of certain public figures to express or explore it for fear of losing their jobs reveals the pervasive anxiety that surrounded homosexuality throughout the 1950s, especially in the academy. This is a period that “witnessed a tremendous upsurge in publicity about ‘sexual perverts,’” when “three of President Harry Truman’s top advisors wrote him a joint memorandum warning that ‘the country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the Government than about Communists’” (Johnson 2). With the passing of sexual psychopath laws targeting homosexuals in twenty-one states and the District of Columbia by the late 1950s, “life for many American gay men and lesbians was now more fearful and secretive than ever before” (White 291). Over the next decades, more individuals would lose their jobs or be denied jobs because of their supposed homosexuality than for connections to the Communist Party (Kirchick). This is the period known as the Lavender Scare, less cited than the Red Scare but perhaps even more devastating.
24This repression affected even individuals who did not hold governmental or academic posts. In an interview with Ekbert Faas conducted in 1980, Duncan asks: “Did you ever talk to Creeley about the letter sent to Olson where he says something like ‘why do you bring this lavender or something into the group?’” (Wagstaff 258). Duncan goes on to explain that Creeley was referring to the purple poetry he wrote during this period, yet it is impossible to ignore the homosexual connotations of the phrase. Indeed, Duncan himself, after explaining Creeley’s reference, almost immediately links this exchange to the reaction he faced after his essay “The Homosexual in Society” was published in 1944. For Duncan and gay poets like him, the homophobia of American life during the 1950s – especially in the government and the academy – was not an abstraction.
25The lack of explicitly homosexual poetry in The New American Poetry, with a few exceptions, mainly from Allen Ginsberg, could have been caused in part by a harshly repressive American Cold War culture, and is possibly attributable to Donald Allen’s editorial choices as well. Nevertheless, Allen’s sexuality and that of some of the poets in the anthology was not lost on certain readers, like editor Jory Sherman, who called The New American Poetry “a daisy chain affair with every snotnosed poet running to him with hardon, and ms. clutched in crotch” (Weddle 67). This aggressive anti-homosexual rhetoric, and the myriad ways that gay poets responded to it, were rooted in the context of the Cold War, when, as several critics have pointed out, homosexuals often felt compelled to mask and subvert their own sexuality, even in one another’s company.
26Davidson cites the “compulsory homosociality” (Davidson 28) of 1950s avant-garde poets, specifically around Jack Spicer in San Francisco and Charles Olson at Black Mountain College, to whom Allen refers in his letter to Duncan as one source of the community of love. During the Cold War, alongside a greater awareness of homosexuals, there was a constellating of homosexual identities, as different communities interpreted issues of identity and rebellion against a repressive society in different ways (Davidson 28). Perhaps accordingly, Allen and Duncan locate their ideas about the community of love in distinct contexts. Allen frames it within the rough-and-tumble camaraderie of Black Mountain while Duncan places it in the context of Eros and the romance tradition.
27In the same letter quoted above, Duncan continues with a lengthy description of contemporary poets’ ideas regarding sexuality, passion and the body:
Among the new poets, as I hint in the new notes to my Politics article, there is a marked search to attack the sensual unity with drugs–aspiring to subject senses to psyche: impotence, constipation, stomach cramps, and paranoiac projection of the “scene” are the result. Self-loathing is almost the mode of Ginsberg, McClure, and Lamantia. The new poets seem anyway to shift from the genitals to the viscera; the stomach and not the heart [...] is the emotional center; poets of shit and not of blood. The decline in sexuality between Ulysses or Lady Chatterly’s Lover and The Subterraneans or Howl is major. (Duncan 1959)
28Duncan seems to object to depictions of physical relations from his contemporaries because they profane the tradition of romance and locate it in baser instincts. It is important here that Duncan does not suggest that his non-academic contemporaries had succeeded in their depictions of love and romance. Duncan laments the dissolution of the “lover’s quest” in contemporary American poetry, suggesting that promiscuity had taken the place of chivalry and courting. This “intensity” that Duncan writes about in regard to relationships and how those without public personas can afford to be intense refers to heterosexual and homosexual relationships alike, and cuts across the divide of academic and avant-garde.
29The Politics article Duncan refers to here is a revised version of “The Homosexual in Society,” complete with new notes, which he prepared in 1959 (Duncan 2014, 444). There is a revealing portrait of W. H. Auden in Duncan’s 1959 notes for the essay (Duncan 2014, 446) that harmonizes with Duncan’s description of a lack of freedom among academic poets to deal truthfully with their sex lives. According to Duncan’s 1959 notes, he wrote to “an eminent poet in 1945 asking if I could attempt an essay on his work in the light of my concept that his language had been diverted to conceal the nature of his sexual life and that because he could never write directly he had failed to come to grips with immediacies of feeling” (Duncan 2014, 15). Auden declined, apparently because of his work in academia:
I earn a good part of my livelihood by teaching, and in that profession one is particularly vulnerable [...] your essay would be a very convenient red-herring for one’s opponents. (Think of what happened to Bertrand Russell in New York). (ibid.).
30In 1940, Bertrand Russell was given a post as professor at City College of New York, a position that was rescinded after a court ruled that the philosopher was “morally unfit” to teach, due to his beliefs about marriage and relationships (Schugurensky, 2017). Clearly this exchange was on Duncan’s mind when he was writing to Allen, having just revisited it for his notes on the new version of his essay. In 1975, when Duncan was filmed for a documentary, he suggested that the impossibility of an academic career for a non-closeted homosexual like himself had been a turning point of his life:
When I was 17 and 18 and in love with a college professor and living with a college professor, what I saw there was the double life that homosexuals lived in the academic world. And I knew another thing about myself that was after all a strength [...] one thing I was never going to have, and maybe I was not capable of it, but certainly I also had a moral conviction against it [...]. I was not going to have a double life. (Carvel)
31The awareness among homosexual poets in the 1950s that there was simply no place for them in the academy if they did not repress their sexuality sheds new light on the period’s academic and avant-garde debate and also suggests that arguments such as Golding’s that the academy was not “an external and easily located ‘enemy’” (Golding 204) have not taken into account the real ways that academic employment was incompatible with homosexuality during the Cold War.
32At the beginning of his commentary on the new publication of “The Homosexual in Society” in 1959, Duncan emphasizes that although his life had improved since the composition of the essay, “all this sense of danger remains” because homosexuality was still considered a “crime” (Duncan 2014, 12). He goes on to describe sexual love as a “singular adventure,” and suggests that he didn’t consider homosexual and heterosexual love as mutually exclusive. As Duncan writes:
The sense of this essay rests then upon the concept that sexual love between those of the same sex is one with sexual love between men and women; and that this love is one of the conditions of the fulfillment of the heart’s desire and the restoration of man’s free nature. Creative work for the common good is one of the conditions of that nature. Our hope lies still in the creative imagination wherever [...] it transforms the personal experience into a communal good. (Duncan 2014, 13)
33This contradicts critics who have argued, citing Sherman Paul’s description of “homoeros” in Duncan’s work, that “the object of love in Duncan’s poetry is male” (Watten 307). And, while Duncan doesn’t explicitly mention the community of love in “The Homosexual in Society,” the title makes clear that the essay is concerned with the gay individual in the overtly heterosexual society, thus suggesting that homosexuals formed a kind of sub-community. Over the course of the essay Duncan draws connections between personal experience and the communal good, and also remarks on what he calls a “community of thoughtful men” (Duncan 6). Duncan’s social ideal is “that fulfillment of desire as a human state of mutual volition and aid, a shared life” (Duncan 13), which sounds very close indeed to the community of love.
34The complex connotations of “the community of love” took on specifically political meanings during the Cold War. Allen’s use of the phrase suggests several possible interpretations, including those concerning homosexuality and the place of the homosexual in society. Considering how homosexuality was conflated with radical politics and social aberration during the Cold War adds a new dimension to the post-war divide between the academy and the avant-garde, revealing that one key element of the rebellion of Duncan and other poets against the academy was the fact that it was not possible to be both openly homosexual and a teacher. This allows us to clarify the slackly formulated binary of academic and avant-garde.
35While not every poem in The New American Poetry explicitly focuses on love and community, the concept of the community of love pervades the anthology, from its organization to the content of the poems, both of which display a sense of poetic community. Perhaps the clearest indication that these poets and their work form a community is the number of poems dedicated to poets who are also included in the anthology, including those by David Meltzer, LeRoi Jones, Richard Duerden, Jack Spicer, Helen Adam, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. Many of the anthology’s poems are focused on love, relationships and community, including Ginsberg’s “The Shrouded Stranger,” “Sunflower Sutra” and “Sather Gate Illumination;” Bruce Boyd’s “This Is What the Watchbird Sings, Who Perches in the Lovetree;” Joel Oppenheimer’s “The Bath” and “The Feeding;” Robert Creeley’s “The Warning,” “A Marriage,” and “Ballad of the Despairing Husband;” Helen Adam’s “I Love My Love;” Barbara Guest’s “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher;” Jonathan Williams’s “The Switch Blade ( or, John’s Other Wife;” Gregory Corso’s “Marriage;” Gary Snyder’s “For a Far-Out Friend;” Paul Blackburn’s “The Once-Over;” Philip Whalen’s “Two Variations: All about Love;” and Stuart Z. Perkoff’s “Feasts of Death, Feasts of Love,” among others. And certainly, love and Eros are central to the poetry of Robert Duncan. It is not too utopian to imagine how different the current landscape of American poetry would appear if Allen had cited the community of love rather than a total rejection of academic verse in his introduction to The New American Poetry.
36And yet. A recent essay on the centenary of Duncan’s birth cites an unpublished biographical note from 1984, in which Duncan mentions that he has long had “an apocalyptic antagonism to the military industrial complex that was to dominate both capitalist and communist societies in a permanent war economy” (Teare 2019), an example of the difficulty of pinning Duncan down on any specificities. But thinking about Duncan, Allen, Cold War poetry and the avant-garde and academic binary in this way situates the discourse surrounding Duncan and The New American Poetry in a fruitful framework of Cold War politics, culture, sexuality, and freedom, adding crucial nuance to our understanding of Allen’s anthology, Duncan’s writing and the post-war era.
Flux RSS
