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As Lisa Jarnot relates in her new biography of Duncan, the Symmeses interpreted their son’s dream immediately: it was a ‘wound in time’, a memory from a previous life. The boy was watching the inundation of his native Atlantis. This notion about Atlantis was an old one, older even than Duncan himself. He was born in Oakland about ten hours before his birth mother died, possibly from Spanish flu. His father, a railroad engineer, was stricken with grief and refused help from relatives; within a year Duncan and his seven siblings were ‘effectively orphaned’. The Symmeses had been told by an astrologer that their destiny was to raise a boy born at dawn on 7 January 1919, and they confirmed the truth of their hermetic beliefs by doing just that. They brought up their new son to believe he had been an Atlantean inventor in a former life, ‘of the ancient generation that had recklessly destroyed its own world’. The Symmeses’ esoteric interests faded as they settled into lives of middle-class rectitude, but their ‘pot and pantheism’ was a powerful influence on Duncan: ‘It was not a dogma nor was it a magic that I understood for myself … but I understood that the meanings of life would always be, as they were in childhood, hidden away, in a mystery, exciting question after question, a lasting fascination.’ And even though Duncan stopped believing in ‘a historical Atlantis’ by the time he was a teenager, the myth remained, Jarnot writes, ‘an enduring inspiration’ for his work. The dream of the sunken city supplied the setting for what is probably his best-known poem, ‘Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow’, in which the dream-field acquires a hyper-uranian aspect to become wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall. As a mature poet, Duncan was accused by his friend Charles Olson – along with just about everyone else who read his work – of wanton myth-mongering, a charge against which he didn’t even try to defend himself.
For the original version including any supplementary images or video, visit https://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n20/robert-baird/use-use-use
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