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

Rubaiyat, 
Lamantia would move on to Edgar Allan Poe, thus placing himself directly in touch 
with one of surrealism’s earliest acknowledged forebears. “Poe,” André Breton writes 
in the first “Manifesto of Surrealism” (1924), “is surrealist in adventure,” consonant 
with Lamantia’s poetic reading of “night-beings” like the Shadow.
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Nothing from Lamantia’s 
Rubaiyat survives; nonetheless, the poem impressed 
the adults in his life with its level of accomplishment, leading to his own self- 
identification as a poet by age fourteen. According to his autobiographical notes, his 
poetic vocation came to him on the top of San Bruno Mountain, after observing the 
weird effects of the winds and fog banks that surrounded it, evidence of his response 
to the marvels of the natural world.
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There, in the center of a “classic grove of trees,” 
he heard “an inner voice declaring me a poet.” Lamantia noted that “it was there on 
that mountain that I wrote my first modernist poem ‘Paranoid Dream.’ ” This poem 
was not preserved, though another from this time, “Ages in the Wind,” survives, 

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xxvi high poet
due to its appearance in the 1943 installment of 
The Young West Sings: Anthology of 
California High School Poetry— his first publication. With its reference to the “dark 
cultures and ages” and “the Nile,” “Ages in the Wind” appears to allude to Lamantia’s 
burgeoning interest in the mysteries of past civilizations, fueled in part by a visit 
around this time to the library of the Philosophical Research Society, established by 
Manly P. Hall in 1936, in Los Angeles.
Encounter with Surrealism
“Paranoid Dream” seems to reflect (or even to anticipate) the young poet’s encoun-
ter with the “paranoia-critical method” of renegade surrealist Salvador Dalí, whose 
paintings were exhibited in a retrospective at the San Francisco Palace of the Legion 
of Honor in the spring of the year that this poem was written, 1942.
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The Dalí exhibi-
tion, along with a nearly concomitant retrospective of the works of Joan Miró at the 
San Francisco Museum of Art, brought surrealism to the attention of the teenaged 
Lamantia with all the force of a revelation. Here was a worldview and a practice that 
could accommodate the unsettling modes of consciousness that were already flower-
ing in him. Lamantia would reiterate, throughout his life, the lessons learned from 
these two exhibitions: that surrealism is not a 
style (as demonstrated by the contrast 
between Dalí’s classical figuration and Miró’s semiabstraction) but a transmogri-
fication of art— and ultimately of reality itself— into something 
other. Moreover, 
the citations from surrealist texts that accompanied the paintings were electrifying 
in their own right. These texts seemed, as Lamantia later attested, to flow into the 
paintings themselves, aspiring toward the 
supreme point (posited by André Breton) 
where conventional categories— between word and image, sleep and waking, reason 
and madness, life and death— are abolished.
After viewing these examples of surrealist 
painting, Lamantia resolved to practice 
surrealist 
writing— seized with the notion, as he explained many years later in his lec-
tures at the San Francisco Art Institute, that paintings and poems were interchangeable 
manifestations of the same unsayable, unpictureable sur-reality.
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Following his visits 
to these exhibitions, Lamantia scoured the San Francisco Public Library for materials 
relating to surrealism and came up with only a handful of books, among them David 
Gascoyne’s