What is the author's style in An African Elegy by Robert Duncan?

Although the poem is called an elegy, its tone shifts between celebration and lament, sometimes approaching a kind of self-destructive ecstasy. The first stanza prepares the reader for this vacillation as it begins with the statement, "No greater marvelous / know I than the mind's / natural jungle," and then shifts to a description of the ominous nature of Death's sounds. Duncan's archaic spelling, sometimes using t instead of -edendings for the past tense (e.g., "stopt" instead of "stopped"), his inversion of subjects and verbs, and his exotic word choice give his poem a formal and often magical tone.