| Summary: | This paper explores the poetry of Robert Duncan and the political potential of melancholy. Relying on Judith Butlers examination of the difference between mourning and melancholy in Precarious Lives, I argue that Robert Duncan enacts a condition of melancholia that he might respond to what Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands identifies in Queer Ecologies as the psychically ungrievable: homosexual desire and the environment. I contend in this thesis that one might enact an active experience of melancholy as both a preservative and rejuvenative force.
In the first chapter of the thesis I explore Robert Duncans revisitation of a passage from Ovids Metamorphoses in his 1964 poem Cyparissus, arguing that Duncan recovers the myth from Ovids implicitly homophobic subtext. In the second chapter of the thesis I examine Duncans use of what Timothy Morton terms ambient poetics, arguing that in his 1968 poem The Fire, Passages 13, Duncan enacts an intertextual and melancholic ambience as a means to critique the environmental violence and trauma experienced as a cultural byproduct of the Vietnam War.
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