Continuing with my erratic searches for the early recognition of Corbin among American poets (which will eventually get organized & gathered in an essay) - The following passage is from pp. 73-4 of Robert Duncan's as yet unpublished H.D. Book (to be published by the University of California Press in 2010). This marks the earliest mention of Corbin in that text. It is from Chapter 5: Occult Matters, which first appeared in Stony Brook 1 in the Fall of 1968. I have not even begun an exhaustive search for Corbin references in Duncan's work & may not have the time or energy to do that, but I would appreciate help from anyone who knows Duncan's opus in at least finding the earliest references he makes to Corbin. (I hope to have some information soon from Lisa Jarnot, Duncan's biographer.)
"In the beginning I heard of guardian angels and of genii, of vision in dreams and truth in fairy tales, long before Jung expounded the gnosis or Henri Corbin revived and translated the Recitals of Avicenna. For these ideas were properties not only of the mind above, the high thought of Neo-Platonists or of Romantic poets, but they were lasting lore of the folk mind below too, wherever old wives told their tales. Gossip had brought rumors of the divine wisdom into American folk ways. From the popular movement of nineteenth century American spiritualism, where witch tradition out of Salem, shaman rite out of the world of the American Indian, and talking in tongues or from the spirit out of congregations of the Holy Ghost in the Protestant movement, mingled to become an obsession at large, so that in the last decades of the century in town and in the country groups met to raise the dead at rapping and levitating tables, new affinities with more ancient mystery cults of spirit and of a life beyond life were awakened. The theosophy of Plutarch, Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the hermeticism of Pico della Mirandola, or The Light of Asia and the Bhagavad-Gita, joined in the confusion of texts and testimonies of libraries that could include accounts written by trance-mediums of travel to past time or far planets, manuals of practical astrology and numerology, or Max Heindel’s The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, 'Its Message and Mission: A Sane Mind. A Soft Heart. A Sound Body.' "
William Blake - from the Book of Job, When the Morning Stars Sang Together.
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