Discussions of the late twentieth-century regional poetic communities introduced by The New American Poetry have considered the Berkeley Renaissance a precursor to the San Francisco Renaissance, interpreting their onomastic "Renaissance" as an innovative, aesthetic, and anti-authoritarian poetics. This dissertation offers an unwritten chapter in the narrative documentary of mid-century poetry by examining how historiography informs the serial poems of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser, the three main poets of the "Berkeley Renaissance" poetry community of the 1940s who studied with the medieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz at UC Berkeley and whose "Renaissance" enacts poetic regeneration.

Contemporary inter-disciplinary studies of history and literature have questioned the synchronic organizations of literary periods and have argued for a continuity extending the pre- and early modern to the postmodern. I apply this continuity of an integral and ever-evolving teleological modernity to the Berkeley poets' continuous series, which incorporate their studies of medieval and Renaissance poetics into the form's operative simultaneity and equivalence. While it acknowledges the serial poem as a twentieth-century form, my exegetical study demonstrates how their series, written in increments that chart a temporal and spatial erring which we attribute to the postmodern, formally manifest poetic correspondences with early modern texts. Through metaphoric equivalence and metonymic correlations, their continuous series incorporate early modern ideas of secular time and sacred continuity into a poetics which focuses on the linguistic objectivity of the poetic process over the erotic subjectivity of the individual poet.

Their series arrange three main meta-poetic foci, which I discuss throughout this study: an eviternal poetic measurement, derived from Kantorowicz's reading of Dante; a regenerative lyric tradition which reclaims and codifies homoeroticism as poetic sublimation; and poetic access as literary and epistolary correspondence with one's poet-auctores. Their inter-textual incorporations—ranging from archaic Greek logos to Platonic progeny, early modern lyric syllogism, and modern imagism and objectivism—form an argument of tradition itself Maintaining that the form charts a metonymy of the poet within tradition, stasis within transformation, and fragment within integrity, I conclude that the serial poems of the Berkeley Renaissance enact a meta-historical participation—what Blaser calls their "fall into history."