Robert Duncan’s Craft Exchanges: Doing Ground Work in the Pastoral

Abstract

Robert Duncan’s The Opening of the Field (1960) raises an issue about the pastoral tradition that might be formulated as a question: For what is its opening song an image? At the core of Duncan’s critique of the modernist poetic tradition is his analysis of the composite relation of images to songs, as well as an effort to appropriate neither as mere poetic techniques. Duncan disavowed the modernist poet’s penchant for long poems with plans and claimed that his “endless” poem “The Structure of Rime,”inaugurated in The Opening of the Field, should not be printed, in sequence, all together as a book because to do so would deracinate it from its linguistic ground in the volumes in which it first appeared.¹ So much, one might object, for evading plans. Something else is going on.