Robert Duncan, Kabbalah, and “The Dominion of the Poetic Mind”
Norman Finkelstein
Sillages Critiques January 30, 2025 DOI: 10.4000/sillagescritiques.10252 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Mysticism |
| Keywords | Kabbalah The h.d. book Robert duncan Magic Hermeticism |
| Key points | Argues that Robert Duncan's study of Kabbalistic language mysticism provided a model for his poetic practice, in which poetic language itself is magical and can serve as a vehicle for mystical experience. |
Abstract
What leads poets into mystical, hermetic and occult studies? How do these traditions shape their poetic practice, and conversely, how do their poems deepen our understanding of the enduring power of these bodies of thought, belief, and ritual? In response to these questions, this paper focuses on Robert Duncan’s study of Kabbalah, especially Kabbalistic language mysticism, which he reads as “the description of the process of a poem.” For Duncan, the language magic of Kabbalah is an important model of poetic language – which is in itself magical. “By associations, by metaphor, by likeness of the part, by fitting as part of a larger figure, by interlinking of members, by share, by equation, by correspondence, by reason, by opposition, by pun or rhyme, by melodic coherence,” Duncan, as he writes in The H.D. Book, seeks to take us to a place “where the image becomes informed, from above or below, and takes over as an entity in itself, a messenger from a higher real.” Situating Duncan as the heir to nineteenth-century occult organizations and the rethinking of hermetic traditions in groups such as the Order of the Golden Dawn, I then proceed to a brief reading of his poem “Roots and Branches,” in order to demonstrate how Duncan’s kabbalistic vision of the “imaginary tree of the living in all its doctrines” awakens “transports of an inner view of things,” and secures the poetic imagination as the supreme vehicle of mystical experience.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on mysticism, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| The mystical mind: probing the biology of religious experience | 2000 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Religious and Mystical Experiences as Artifacts of Temporal Lobe Function: A General Hypothesis | 1983 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy | 1993 | Edited collection of essays | |
| Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century | 2020 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mysticism and schizophrenia: A phenomenological exploration of the structure of consciousness in the schizophrenia spectrum disorders. | 2016 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |