Duncan’s Stein Writings: Derivation and Logopoeia

Abstract

This article begins by considering Duncan’s Stein writings as a criticism of highly invested modernist suppositions regarding originality and mastery, these latter exemplified by Wyndham Lewis’s view of Hemingway as castrated and belittled by his inability not to imitate Gertrude Stein. It continues to examine Duncan’s mobilisation of syllepsis in his Stein writings, and to relate this figure to the Poundian conception of logopoeia, first elaborated in relation to the writings of Mina Loy and Marianne Moore. This allows for a recontextualisation of Stein within the history of Anglo-American modernist poetry by women, and a consideration of its consequences. The paper ends with a brief examination of the relationship of Duncan and Spicer in their shared but distinct projects of challenging essential tenets of modernist lyric ideology, a project for which Stein proves a crucial resource to Duncan, not least in offering a form of “permission” for the exploration of certain forms of “bad” writing.

Keywords

• Robert Duncan
• Gertrude Stein
• Jack Spicer
• Wyndham Lewis
• logopoeia
• syllepsis