CAESAR'S GATE by Robert Duncan with paste-ups by Jess

Sand Dollar, 1972, Second edition, limited to 600 hardbound copies. 71 pp., 6 1/2" X 8 3/4" Fine When Duncan returned in 1972 to Caesar’s Gate (1955), a book of poems written mainly in 1949 and 1950 (with collages by Jess), he resurrected an earlier work that he had all but repudiated.1 The new Caesar’s Gate has received little critical attention, which is unfortunate because it tells much about Duncan’s state of mind while he was working on his crucial late book, Ground Work: Before the War? In 1970 he suffered the loss of Charles Olson, the poet whom he regarded as the standard-bearer for his generation. At the same time, Duncan, like Whitman during the Civil War, regarded the ravages of the Vietnam War as an attack upon his own person—identifying with the national body and its fateful implication in an imperial war wreaking havoc on Southeast Asia and the United States alike. Another casualty of the war, his profoundly nurturing fellowship with Denise Levertov entered a destructive