^* Robert Duncan proves himself most deeply indebted to H. D. and Williams in his lifelong preoccupation with war as primal strife. The first volume of Ground Work is subtitled Before the War, not as a temporal marker but a posture of physical address, like the body before a mirror—war as mirror in which Duncan attempted to reflect on himself as early as in “An Essay at War,” written during the Korean War:

The war is a mineral perfection, clear,
unambiguous evil   within which
our delite, our life,   is the flaw,
the contradiction?