“In Couples, In Small Companies”: On Robert Duncan and Sentimental Modernism

Abstract:Central to Robert Duncan’s cosmopolitan, transhistorical mega-coteries is a mode of literary production that holds the poem as a catalyst for intimacies that open into the public sphere. Duncan’s queer poetics of coupling and bundling has an ultimately anarchic effect that moves beyond his account of modernism’s insular elite communities and toward a “symposium of the whole.” The poet’s emphasis on the intimate dimensions of poetic Eros foreshadow what scholars have called “sentimental modernism,” which links modernism (and, with this essay, postmodernism’s Open Field) to nineteenth-century women’s writing and sentimentalism. To show how Duncan helps build this bridge, I compare the couples and threesomes mobilized to articulate a theory of poetry in The H.D. Book (1959–1964) to the spiritualist metaphysics of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s sentimental novel The Gates Ajar (1868), showing how both describe intimacies that culminate in a “communion of saints” in the present.