the real estate modern man has made of Earth

"Sentimentality" is often the accusation brought by the critic when he would refuse some experience or idea arising in the poem that does not satisfy or support his personal world of values but would threaten, if it were allowed, to undo that world. The word "sentimental" means "supposed" experience, I suppose. "You do not really feel that" or "you are letting your feelings get away with you" is the reproof often where we would not like to allow the feeling detected to advance, lest we too feel what the advancing feeling brings with it. Much of modern criticism of poetry is not to raise a crisis in our consideration of the content or to deepen our apprehension of the content, but to dismiss the content. When such critics would bring the flight of imagination down to earth, they mean not the earth men have revered and worked with love and awe, the imagined earth, but the real estate modern man has made of Earth for his own uses.

- Robert Duncan, from his essay "The Truth & Life of Myth: An Essay in Essential Autobiography", as published in his Collected Essays and Other Prose.

Thank you to Don Share for pulling this quote out and sharing it.

#whitepoetproblems

[Robert Duncan's] biological mother died in childbirth. He was adopted into a family of Theosophists. His adoptive parents were part of a hermetic brotherhood in Oakland, California... [They] adopted Duncan based on his astrological chart, and they told him that they had adopted him because of his “bad karma”...

Duncan had a troubled relationship with [his mother]. There are a couple things here: he was homosexual... she didn’t seem to have trouble with that so much. And it may actually have been part of the prediction, based on his astrological chart, that he would be “deviant” in this way. The chart also, according to his parents, showed that he had had his last incarnation in Atlantis, and that he had been part of a generation that had destroyed their own world, and that he had been brought back for the end times, now, which would be some fiery ending, probably atomic... That was in his head, growing up. But I don’t think that bothered him as much as the fact that she wanted him to be an architect.

- Lisa Jarnot, Robert Duncan's biographer, in interview with Curtis Fox for Poetry Off the Shelf, proving that even the crazies wish their kids would stop writing poetry and get real jobs. You can listen to the whole thing here.