Out of the Wilderness

“Here, Brother Antoninus, who is a nationally known poet and a very famous fine printer, is printing some copies of his own poems on his hand press.” Thus goes the voice-over in a 1961 local television show about life at St. Albert’s, a Dominican priory near the University of California, Berkeley. The program features friars tending the garden, working in the woodshop, and chanting the Exsultet, an ancient Easter song of praise. Brother Antoninus, an apron over his black habit and his sleeves rolled past his elbows, nearly fades into the background of the black-and-white film. He holds up for the camera a section of long poetic lines spanning the page. Later in the program, he stands with the choir at the Solemn Mass.

Brother Antoninus was William Everson, a Beat poet and conscientious objector. An ardent disciple of Robinson Jeffers, Everson was likewise a poet of nature and passion and rooted in California. He spent nearly 20 years as a Dominican lay brother, a period that defined his life as a poet and that remains one of the most fascinating interludes of religious transformation in American poetry. Everson is a paradox: a religious poet torn between the sensuality of faith and liturgy and his own sexual desires. He embraced a monastic existence, then became an itinerant preacher of poetry—a “Beat Friar” who was profiled in Time magazine and who traveled across the country giving spoken-word performances—only to end his religious life in one dramatic moment.

Dana Gioia, California’s poet laureate, has appreciated Everson’s work since 1977, when Stanford’s literary magazine, of which Gioia was the poetry editor, published an issue devoted to Everson. “He is the archetypal West Coast bohemian intellectual,” Gioia tells me. “He could never have happened in the East—from farm to federal camp to bohemia to monastery to university to rural hermitage.”

Everson was born in 1912 and raised on a farm in the San Joaquin Valley. His parents were Christian Scientists, although that biographical footnote is complicated. His father was agnostic in practice; his mother was born and raised Catholic, but the church wouldn’t allow her to marry a divorced man. They were both printers who had met at a small newspaper in Minnesota before heading west. Their mix of residual Catholicism and pastoral agnosticism created a unique religious background for Everson.

But the young Everson wasn’t pious. His first religious experience happened in October 1934, when he discovered Jeffers’s strange, visceral poetry while attending Fresno State. Jeffers’s poems are sweeping odes to the value and violence of the natural world. His long, tumbling lines are Whitmanesque but wholly Californian in tone. In Everson’s introduction to the reissue of Jeffers’s Cawdor and Medea (1970), he writes that Jeffers’s poetry represents how “the latent American pantheistic seed had found its Californian fertility.” Everson calls Jeffers “God-tormented,” a man out of place in the Modernist era, whose “resilient, massive, intellectually resonant verse idiom … enabled him to assail with such authority the complacencies of his time.” In “The Beauty of Things,” Jeffers writes that “the sole business of poetry” is “to feel / Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural / Beauty.” All else is “diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas, / The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.”

Everson later said that “Jeffers showed me God in the cosmos, it took and I became a pantheist.” (His pantheism was distinctly, thoroughly sexual, based on “a kind of religious sexuality,” as Everson described it.) He left college “to become a poet.” He returned to his hometown of Selma, about 200 miles equidistant between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and married Edwa Poulson, whom he’d known since high school. They started a small vineyard, and Everson wrote poetry. His verse was palpably sexual, as in this sequence from “The Masculine Dead”:

Or drunken with wine we mounted the stairs to the dim rooms.
They met us, painted mouths and the false smile.
We put our hands in their clothes.
We took them naked and laughing in our aching arms,
And crushed them against us,
Pouring our strength in their blind wombs,
And left them, swaggering,
Our money hid in the secret drawer. 

Everson self-published three collections: These Are the Ravens (1935), San Joaquin (1939), and The Masculine Dead (1942), books that Kenneth Rexroth helped Everson collect into The Residual Years. The two poets met shortly after Everson moved to the Bay Area in 1946. Rexroth was an anthology-minded poet (he edited the New British Poets anthology for New Directions). According to biographer Lee Bartlett, Rexroth invited Everson to an apartment party with the renowned critic and editor Cyril Connolly, during which Rexroth told the partygoers that “Everson is truly autochthonous. You won’t find in him the Modernist touchstones by which we others go about what we do. He doesn’t need our sophistication because he possesses a primal innocence; he doesn’t need our ideas because he thinks through his skin and suffers through his thought.” Rexroth’s long, anonymous blurb for The Residual Years makes even grander claims, calling Everson’s poetry “simple, sensuous, and passionate, as Milton said great poetry should be.” Rexroth found Everson to be much like the poetry of those early volumes: pastoral, purely Californian, and more inclined toward nature than humanity—exactly the qualities Everson had appreciated in Jeffers.

Everson was drafted in January 1943. Albert Gelpi, a longtime professor at Stanford whose scholarship has shaped understanding of the poet, wrote that “Everson’s pantheism made him a pacifist.” For Everson, “death and destruction in nature were part of the ecological cycle,” but violence from human hands was unacceptable. As “alternative service,” Everson was placed in a foresting camp for conscientious objectors in Oregon during the war years. Poulson moved to San Francisco. Their marriage didn’t survive the separation.

In Oregon, Everson worked as a printer, an art he’d inherited from his parents. Growing up, he fed press and set type but “did not have any finesse with it.” Skilled printers at the Oregon camp mentored him, and he was able to return to his poetry.

Everson left the camp in July 1946 and soon after met Mary Fabilli, a Catholic poet and artist, in San Francisco. Everson’s pantheism was tired; his mystical and religious longing found muse and matter in Fabilli, who had recently made an earnest return to the faith of her youth. During this period, Everson wrote poetry and spent time with fellow poets Rexroth and Robert Duncan. He also attended mass with Fabilli.

Everson was skeptical of the institutional church, which he described as “a monolithic, quasi-political organization which by exploiting certain weaknesses in collective human nature, was able to solidify itself, perpetuate itself in history . . . and I hated it.” Yet he’d fallen for Fabilli, and he inherited her interest in the art of the church. He was moved by her phonograph record of Gregorian chants that played when he wrote in the house on Saturdays. He called it a “tremendous sublime . . . there was being shaped a dimension and a context, a movement of life around sacramental norms which I had never experienced before.” Fabilli’s faith was a “fabulous Latin beauty, this Latin sensitivity,” Everson wrote. “And physical, profoundly physical. The concrete, sensible dimension pervading her whole mode of life.”

Meanwhile, Fabilli “began to civilize” Everson, much to the chagrin of Rexroth, who wanted “[Everson to be] kind of an Abraham Lincoln character,” according to Everson, who added, “I was in a way the central hope for his beat generation.” Indeed, Rexroth considered Everson the prototypical Beat: a man who had suffered and who had been “locked up for his convictions.” Everson even looked the part, with his Pendleton shirt, forester’s coat, and a “big black Mennonite style hat.”

No more. Now he donned a sports coat. He cut his hair. He applied for a Guggenheim—and got it. Everson was becoming nationally known. James Laughlin at New Directions published The Residual Years in 1948. Everson, a notorious perfectionist with a printer’s eye, was unhappy with the book’s typography and even quibbled over Rexroth’s dust jacket blurb, which he thought would antagonize critics and reviewers.

The tension with Rexroth was displaced by more spiritual concerns. Everson had read Augustine’s Confessions and was intellectually stirred but eager for a more immediate mystical experience of his own. At church with Fabilli, “in the mystery of the Mass,” he “hoped to find what she had found, what the book had promised.”

He found it at Midnight Mass in 1948, at St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco. Nuns had prepared Christ’s manger with fir trees, and the smell took Everson back to the farm of his childhood. A poet interested in cultivating a personal mythos, Everson found comfort in his belief that Christ would not make him renounce his devotion to the natural world. While his wife knelt in prayer next to him, Everson spent the moments before Mass in reverie. He thought of the Incarnation but also “remembered all the wildernesses I had known, the measureless night, and sensed their plight out there, those primitives, those sheepherders, watching their beasts through the jackal-haunted blackness, huddling a blaze.” 

That synthesis of pagan shepherd and Christ-as-shepherd stirred Everson. He went to the crib at the front of the church as “one more poor wretch, who had nothing to bring but his iniquities.” Writing about the experience for the leftist Catholic publication Ramparts in 1962, Everson recalled, “Even in the days of my greatest resistance, this had been one of the most compelling things I had experienced in the Catholic churches: a kind of inner spontaneous coming-up, as a flock of birds of the fields, out of some inner instinctual thing, rises: the commonness of it, the mutual identity of the need, and this, the response to the need.”

Conversion narratives often turn maudlin, and Everson’s is no exception, although that doesn’t lessen his sincerity. The latent sexuality of his earlier life and verse now found a new vessel: faith. He would never be the same. 

A few days later, he drafted “The Uncouth.” Lines from an early version of the poem were inspired by his vision at mass: “The sheep moved, / And on that scant forage / Browsed fitfully, bleating.” Although Fabilli had charged Everson’s conversion, their marriage couldn’t exist in the eyes of the church. (Fabilli had been married previously, and although Everson wasn’t Catholic when he married Poulson, she was. As of 1984, Everson was still writing the diocese to annul their marriage). Everson and Fabilli separated, and he wrote of the experience in “The Falling of the Grain”:

The summer burns and blazes,
The year begins its drouth.
I watch the one I nevermore
May kiss upon the mouth.

Fabilli brought Everson to faith, but “The next day was the Lord’s. Beyond it / Rose the immitigable week of His great word, / Schismatic in our lives.”

The poem is equal parts explanation and lament. “We erred,” Everson writes, “We sought in each / What only God can give.” A deeply confessional and often conversational poet, Everson wavers between confidence and confusion in his poem but ultimately concludes with purpose. He left his job at a university press and learned how to bind books. He became “apostolic,” enamored with his new spiritual mission. In April 1950, he left Berkeley for Oakland, where he joined the Catholic Workers, the communitarian movement founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin (Everson’s poems later appeared in Day’s Catholic Worker newspaper). Carroll McCool, a former Trappist monk in charge of the house, noticed Everson’s intellectual approach to religion and advised him to pray 10 rosaries a day. The pair walked around Merritt Lake together and up and down the city streets, praying.

Everson set up his hand press in a shed behind the Catholic Worker house. He printed Triptych for the Living (1951), with engravings by Fabilli, while under the spiritual direction of Father Osborn, a Dominican. The excitement of Everson’s initial conversion had begun to fade. Feeling “dry” in his faith, he had another mystical experience at Mass, when “out of the tabernacle came this dark ray.” He collapsed in the pew and wept. He thought a struggle of the soul was inevitable when it came to faith: “I do believe that the life of God cannot be got through without crisis.”

Everson chose the Dominicans over the Franciscans or the Benedictines because the latter gave him “no satisfaction as to the role of the poet in their version of the monastic life.” He never felt censored by the Dominicans. He could openly be a poet and a printer there. In May 1951, Everson joined St. Albert’s as a lay brother. A few months later, he took along his hand press and began a long-term project that earned him fame in the printing world: the Novum Psalterium. His work on the psalter, which continued until 1954, was “more of a complement to my monastic psychology than the writing of poetry,” Everson noted.

From his monastic room at St. Albert’s, Everson could see the “myriad glitter, uncountable” of San Francisco. In the outside world, the “torque toward mere mechanical unity intensifies,” Everson wrote, rebuking a world that is “scanting the vision of a transcendent God etched on the heart of man.” Everson thought of the professors and students at Berkeley and concluded “I, musing in my cloister, who had only to move through the life of secular learning to find it not whole, have turned in here to a deeper integration.”

Ever the Jeffers disciple, Everson considered St. Albert’s more of a resort than a monastery. He “wanted it set in otherwise denuded earth, with one of those unforgettable Spanish crucifixes dominating the center.” He felt like “an utter anachronism, with my fake medieval attitudinizing in a modern cloister.” A parish priest who came to the annual retreat at the monastery quipped that Everson was “Ephrem the Deacon”—a fourth-century saint.

It was then that Everson met another Dominican who had taken the name Antoninus—Father Antoninus Wall, a San Francisco–born priest ordained in 1950. Now 93 years old, Father Wall still lives at St. Albert’s in Oakland, and we recently had a long phone conversation about Everson. Wall recalls that he first clothed Everson in his habit during the poet’s vestition ceremony at the priory.

Father Wall was taken with Everson’s seriousness and thought he would be a good choice to speak with theology students, which Everson did in 1958. The speech had a “tremendous impact” on the students, Wall remembers, adding, “I’ve been 68 years a priest, and it was still the most memorable talk of my entire priesthood that I’ve ever heard.” Everson gave the story of his conversion, including the mystical experience at Christmas Eve Mass the decade before.

The poems Everson wrote during his first years of conversion, 1949 to 1954, were later collected in The Crooked Lines of God (1959). The poems are idiosyncratic and gushing paeans to his spiritual journey. Some, such as “Gethsemani,” are glutted with majestic imagery, and unite Everson’s pre-Catholic sense—a sexual, natural primitivism—with his singular vision of God:

How soft, how still,
Lambent, the outlying fields
How open, under this little height,
Rife with the surcharge of spring,
How rich—and the raw
Smell of the plough.
These are the nights a man and a woman
Wander the orchard,
Drunk with the odor of plum-flower.

Desire gives in to destiny here, for “Whatever the flesh may suffer / The soul suffers before.” Everson envisions himself as a messenger, a man who traded the wilderness for monastic walls so that others could see “that the god was man, / That the man could faint, / This the world must know.”

Christ’s vulnerability appealed to Everson. The title “Gethsemani” refers to the garden in Jerusalem where Jesus and his disciples prayed. It was there that Judas found and betrayed Christ with a kiss on the cheek, and the Passion narrative begins. “Is this the dream,” Everson writes, “that God must dream in man?” There is anger in Everson’s lines, mirroring the frustration of the biblical narrative. Christ was sent to “help redeem their fall,” yet the disciples, seemingly “the best of humankind / Snore by the wall.”

“The Massacre of the Holy Innocents,” another poem in the collection, is narrated by one of King Herod’s soldiers, sent to kill infant boys near Bethlehem. The soldier’s monologue is as cold as the “land lay naked under a frost”; he and the men move from home to home in slaughter. The narrator laments his guilt and the grief that followed. “No matter what dreams of grandeur / Ennobled our sleep on the straw ticks of our barracks, / History stood by our side and said: these are the ones.”

The Crooked Lines of God is an indictment of humankind and a work seared by the emotional charge of conversion. Everson’s earlier work from The Residual Years feels like another world by comparison. Before his religious years, the prototypical Everson poem was one like “Noon,” in which the natural world is absolute and awe-inspiring:

The wind down, hushed;
In the sudden suspension of time and all motion
The sun lies heavily on the hand,
[…]
Deep sun, deep sky;
No wind now for the dance of the leaves;
But the light clean on the shape of the neck,
And the deep sound of the heart.

Everson’s admirers expected similar lines in his new work, but the natural God-consciousness of Jeffers had been replaced with Christ. Rexroth, praising Everson in the New York Times, called the new book “a collection of poems of stunning impact, utterly unlike anything else being written nowadays.” James Dickey, reviewing Everson’s book in the Sewanee Review, found the new book disappointing and argued that it even soured Everson’s early poetry. Upon re-reading The Residual Years, Dickey found Everson’s new poems marked “by the author’s humorless, even owlish striving after self-knowledge and certainty, his intense and bitter inadequacy and frustration.” For Dickey, rather than being cinctured by the habit of religious orthodoxy, Everson had finally found his staid form.

It was nearly an Old Testament judgement. Dickey wrote that Everson’s new book was “page after page of not-very-good, learned, dry sermonizing which in several places leans toward an attitude which I cannot help believing is somewhat self-righteous and even self-congratulatory.” As a whole, the book “is much nearer to being apologetics than poetry,” Dickey wrote, before ending his review with a knockout punch: the book makes him wish that “Brother Antoninus [were] still a farmer in the San Joaquin Valley, ploughing God’s land with his horses.”

Dickey’s missive made it to St. Albert’s, and Everson responded, resulting in a series of posturing letters between the two poets that the Sewanee Review printed in full. Everson was clearly miffed. Piety had not pried away his ego. “Theologically,” Everson counters, “it is not possible to over-stress a divine mystery. … That Mr. Dickey is ignorant of the theological and spiritual issues behind Christian poetry is apparent, and really no fault of his, but it is not intelligent of him to indict what he does not understand.” When Everson wrote those letters, he was years estranged from the words he defended. Between 1954 and 1960, Everson underwent several crises of faith—Wall recalls that Everson once left St. Albert’s for three weeks when they brought in a television, which he saw as a symbol of modernity destroying their monasticism—and it seems Everson had become enamored with his own legend.

By the time he wrote those letters—in which he compares himself to Milton as well as to Isaiah and Jeremiah—Everson had become even more of a national figure. Cloaked in full habit, with a religious escort, he performed in Chicago, Detroit, and other cities but was rebuked by then-Archbishop John Mitty, who preferred a quiet Everson, plying away on the hand press in solemn St. Albert’s.

Mitty’s death in 1961 freed Everson to tour again, and he was especially drawn to colleges: Boston College, Purdue, Notre Dame, and Harvard, where he told The Crimson that he wrote poetry because “it is painful, but there will be a catharsis, a healing, and an appeasement.” He would arrive a few days early on a campus “to start some things moving, stir up some ferment . . . [and then] try to crest that by the reading night,” as Wall recalls. Everson was not there to preach. He kept it literary and considered his readings “more encounters” than traditional lectures. Wall told me that once Everson signed with Naomi Burton—Thomas Merton’s literary agent—he charged more than $1,000 for each reading, which meant the smaller Catholic colleges could no longer afford him. His audiences became ever more secular.

National Education Television filmed one such reading in 1966. Everson followed poet Michael McClure, whose reading ended with him roaring like a lion, eyes closed, in front of an actual lion. Everson is mostly shot on stage, in front of a crowd. He squints behind glasses; his voice rises and falls. He sometimes speaks from memory and at other times reads from a book. “I rise to meet that vision,” he intones, reading from “A Canticle to the Waterbirds,” which ends with lines that recall Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Curlews, stilts and scissortails, beachcomber gulls,
Wave-haunters, shore-keepers, rockhead-holders, all cape-top vigilantes,
Now give God praise.
Send up the strict articulation of your throats,
And say His name.

Wall tells me that “wherever Everson went, he would try to absorb the spirit of the place, and try to become something like an oracle.”

Everson continued to write new poetry during his touring years, although much of it revived themes and styles from his past work. River-Root, a long, highly sexual poem about lovers, was finished in 1957 but wasn’t published until 1976, long after Everson’s Dominican years. The Hazards of Holiness (1962), although published upon completion, contains work that more closely mirrors his early verse. “All the way to heaven / Is Hell,” he writes in a poem titled after that first line. “And the devil posts it.” The entire poem is a lament of temptation: “Oh, brother-devil! / Shadow and adversary! / My keeper! / Double of the heart’s imago! / I do acknowledge!”

Even the biblical work of that period, such as “Passion Week,” skews pantheist. “Christ-cut: the cedar / Bleeds where I gashed it.” In awe, the narrator reports: “The Holy Ghost / Gusted out of the sky / Aghast. // Our Guest.” The spirit of conversion is never permanent, and by these years, Everson felt empty. Rexroth continued to praise him in the New York Times, calling Everson a “rough, urgent, startlingly honest poet, with a passionate identification with the California landscape.” He compared Everson to Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Carl Sandburg, and “the best of Robinson Jeffers.” Yet Everson’s poetry, and his life, had returned to old rhythms.

An acute longing suffuses his work. “You, God” is a plea to the divine: “My brain / Burns on your pierce. / My blood splits. / I shriek each nerve. // God! // Suck me in!” That poem, along with “I Am Long Weaned,” begins with epigraphs from the book of Job, a narrative of suffering. “My mouth, puckered on gall, / Sucks dry curd” he writes, in a piece whose sexuality is no longer vague. “My gut does down / A straight drop to my groin. // My cod is withered string, / My seed, two flints in a sack.” The narrator is sure that someday he “will know God.” “Sophia, deep wisdom, / The splendid unquenchable fount:” the poem ends, “Unbind those breasts.”

The Hazards of Holiness is the work of a soul torn between celibacy and desire, most overtly captured in a pair of poems titled “Missa Defunctorum” and “Missa Sanctorum.” The former feels like a work born of exhaustion. A “preacher’s coagulated rhetoric / Evaporates in his teeth.” Bells “shiver” and incense has a “narcotic pungence.” Spoken in the voice of a friar, the poem drips with misery. The friar watches “the laity lurch to their feet” and can’t bear the “pulverization of empacted Latin.” His bored attention wanders to a man who heads into a red convertible with his wife, her “long legs go scissoring in, and the oblique skirt, / Hitched giddily clear, bludgeons the friars / With a cut of naked thigh.”

“Missa Sanctorum” is even more direct, beginning as an indictment of how sensual women are at Mass, their “deceptive / Complaisance, coming ardently alert / To adore.” When Everson writes how those women are “tightening for the faintest / Suggestible pelvic thrust when the head / Lifts up and goes back to receive / God,” the poem wilts. Everson was clearly torn, and tired, and his art was suffering.

Something had to give, and it soon did. In 1959, Everson met Rose Tannlund. Their intense friendship was the inspiration for The Rose of Solitude (1966). In the prologue, a monk leaves his desert hermitage and “re-enters the world.” In prayer at a basilica, he meets a woman who seeks confession; she admits her love for a priest. In the poems that follow, Everson’s narrator embraces desire. His “problem is primal.” He is unsure if the woman who tempts him is devil, God, or both. Everson’s friendship with Tannlund and his writing of The Rose of Solitude mark a turning point in his evolving faith—he was forced to explicitly acknowledge the conflict between his religious devotion and his erotic sense. He began to imagine the possibility of leaving the priory.  

In 1965, Everson met Susanna Rickson, an 18-year-old student at San Francisco State College. The full extent of this relationship was a secret—even to colleagues such as Father Wall. In the summer of 1969, he and Everson embarked on a trip to Europe. Wall was finishing his doctoral studies in Rome and thought it would be good for Everson to see the church’s aesthetics and deep presence in Europe. Everson was in the process of attaining his final vows to become a priest. Wall worried about the conflict between Everson’s poetic identity and his vow of obedience.

Wall now admits that his worries were misguided. Everson, he tells me, “wanted to conquer Europe.” They spent two months there, with Everson giving readings in several countries. Wall recalls that Ireland, being “full of poets … went wild” over Everson. In England, Everson was invited to give a reading at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, which he began with invective against the city’s literary culture. His plan was to move from pillory to praise and end with a synthesis of the two, but Wall tells me that a “middle-aged, balding guy in the front row” heckled the poet. “Christianity makes my penis shrivel,” the man said. Everson reportedly walked over to him, put his hand on the man’s shoulder, and said, “Let it shrivel.”

Toward the end of their time in Europe, Wall had the strong sense that something was taxing Everson’s mind. The poet was always looking for mail from Rickson, and in October, he returned to the United States. On December 7, 1969, Everson gave a reading at the University of California, Davis. He read “Tendril in the Mesh,” which became the first poem of The Integral Years, the final work in his cumulative trilogy (which includes The Residual Years and The Veritable Years). Equal parts love and lust, the poem made clear Everson’s plans: “Give me your nipples to lip and your ribs to caress, / Take down from your shoulders the silks that have baffled the sun.” He took off his Dominican robe and reportedly told the audience, “This is my habit, and when I take it off, I take off my own skin. But I have to take it off to find my heart.” Everson left the order. Six days later, he wed Rickson in a civil ceremony, in front of two witnesses: the publishers of Oyez Press, a Berkeley-based outfit that published several of Everson’s later books.

I asked Albert Gelpi, now retired from Stanford, what he thought of Everson today. “I do continue to think Bill is one of the important American poets of the second half of the 20th century,” he says, “and along with Denise Levertov, the most important religious poet of the period.” Everson went on to publish poetry and prose after his religious years. He taught, continued printing, and took on a shamanic hue—an evolution via a Jungian system that started with instruction by a Dominican priest. In declining health from Parkinson’s disease, Everson died at his home in Santa Cruz on June 3, 1994, at age 81.

“We could never figure out whether his poetry was absolutely erotic,” Wall says. “Was it the mystical eroticism of Teresa of Ávila? Or was it real eroticism?” Wall laughs; it was real eroticism “with the spiritual tied into it.” Years after Everson left the order, Father Wall invited him back to speak with students, and Everson seemed remorseful: “I gave up all of this for the sake of a woman.” There was something at the core of the monastic life that Everson—who remained a Catholic and was buried in a Dominican cemetery—could never give up.

Catholic, pantheist, friar, lover—Everson embraced the paradoxes and myths of his life, but he was most purely a seeker. One of his first, unfinished poems after his conversion captures his poetic soul: “What was it, beyond women, he so needed to reach? / But he never knew. Only that something persisted / Beyond the lips and the ankles, / that he had to encompass, / And could never touch.”