Great Regulars: According to Minnehaha and Edwin [Symmes],

the life of their adopted son [Robert Duncan] was thick with mystical truths: he had lived on the doomed continent of Atlantis in a previous life; it was necessary for his birth mother to die so that he could achieve his destiny with his true parents; and it was considered "very lazy" of him to want to be a poet. "You have been a poet already in so many lives," his Aunt Fay chided.

It was a childhood whose memory Duncan seemed to enjoy being haunted by, for throughout his career he would return to the fact of his mother dying in childbirth, to the apocalyptic specter of Atlantis and to his adoptive family's hermetic doctrines.

from Ange Mlinko: The Nation: The Unconquered Flame: On Robert Duncan

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