Robert Duncan, Kabbalah, and “The Dominion of the Poetic Mind”
Sillages Critiques January 30, 2025 Norman Finkelstein
Poets' engagement with mystical, hermetic, and occult traditions shapes their poetic practice and deepens understanding of these bodies of thought. Robert Duncan's study of Kabbalah, especially its language mysticism, provides a model for poetic language that is inherently magical. Duncan reads Kabbalah as "the description of the process of a poem," using associations, metaphor, and correspondence to create images that become entities in themselves, messengers from a higher reality. As heir to nineteenth-century occult organizations like the Order of the Golden Dawn, Duncan's kabbalistic vision in poems such as "Roots and Branches" awakens inner transports and positions poetic imagination as the supreme vehicle of mystical experience.