Late in life, Philip Lamantia drafted fragments of a memoir under the working title

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Late in life, Philip Lamantia drafted fragments of a memoir under the working title 
High Poet. He regarded himself as a “high poet” in more than one sense: he was a 
visionary poet who ascended the heights of pure imagination, one who sought both 
intellectual understanding and spiritual transcendence. He was also a poet of vast 
erudition, one for whom learning was equivalent to gnosis; in his wide-ranging read-
ing, he drew out the poetic essence of the sciences, philosophy, and history, which 
he then infused into his own writing. He welcomed (and sometimes provoked) 
visions, through such vehicles as meditation, religious ceremony, and psychotropic 
substances. His quest led outward as well as inward: in 1944, at age sixteen, Lamantia 
left high school in his native San Francisco to join the company of war-exiled Pari-
sian surrealists in New York; and through the 1950s and 1960s, he lived and wrote in 
Mexico, Morocco, France, Italy, Spain, and Greece.
Throughout his poetic itinerary, Lamantia would traverse the ecstatic space 
between writing poetry and religious mysticism, at times rejecting both, then dis-
covering aspects of one within the other— until finally, in the last decade of his life, 
arriving at a synthesis of scholarly erudition and spiritual discernment. Lamantia’s 
high aspiration as a poet is evident in his desire— stated in a late interview— to 
achieve a “
miracle in words.”
1
In tandem with an alternation between the polarities of poetry and mysticism, 
Lamantia struggled with a lifelong manic-depressive condition. Bipolar episodes, 
which could take the form of spiritual crises, led him to withdraw from society for 
long periods, to suppress his own work from publication, and even, on occasion, 
to destroy it. As a result, Lamantia maintained a hermetic presence in American 
poetry, even as he played a seminal role in some of its most innovative developments, 
both through his participation in mentor Kenneth Rexroth’s anarchist Libertarian 
Circle of poets and scholars, subsequently a major component of the San Francisco 
Renaissance, and through his later involvement with the Beat Generation. As 
Rexroth would later write, “a great deal of what has happened since in poetry was 
anticipated in the poetry Lamantia wrote before he was 21.”
2
Even the barest summary of Lamantia’s subsequent life bristles with incident. 
In the mid-1950s, he partook in rituals with the Washoe Indians at Lake Tahoe, 
High Poet: The Life and Work of Philip Lamantia

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xxiv high poet
Nevada, and with the Cora Indians (Nayarit) in Mexico. In 1955, between stays in 
Mexico, Lamantia participated in the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco 
where Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl.” Two years later, shortly after the publica-
tion of Jack Kerouac’s 
On the Road (1957), Lamantia gave what are widely considered 
to be the first public jazz poetry readings, with Kerouac, Howard Hart, and musi-
cian David Amram. Yet by 1960, even as he was featured in Donald Allen’s ground-
breaking anthology, 
New American Poetry: 1945– 1960, Lamantia had renounced 
poetry, burning most— though not all— of his unpublished work. In late 1962, he 
left America for Europe, devoting himself to the study of Egyptian symbology and 
Renaissance hermetic traditions— yet in 1965, after meeting his future wife, Nancy 
Peters, he dramatically returned to both poetry and surrealism, beginning his long 
association with City Lights Books with the 1967 publication of his 
Selected Poems: 
1943– 1966. In the early ’70s, after returning to San Francisco, he affiliated himself 
with the Chicago Surrealist Group, led by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, con-
tributing to its journal 
Arsenal while remaining aloof from both mainstream literary 
culture and the constructivist aesthetics of language poetry. The 1980s would reveal 
an increasing ecological consciousness in his poetry, manifesting itself through his 
exploration of the Pacific Coast wilderness, ornithology, and Native American cul-
tures. His ongoing interest in Egypt culminated in a long poem of that title, inspired 
by his 1989 visit to the monuments at Luxor.
By the mid-’90s, Lamantia had largely fallen silent due to severe depression, though 
he would reemerge after the publication of