High Poet: The Life and Work of Philip Lamantia
December 31, 2019 DOI: 10.1525/9780520954892-003 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Keywords | Work physics Art history Literature Mechanical engineering |
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| Citations | 24 |
| Key points | Argues that Lamantia regarded himself as a 'high poet' in multiple senses: a visionary poet who sought intellectual understanding and spiritual transcendence, and one who infused his writing with poetic essence drawn from sciences, philosophy, and history. |
Abstract
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 reading, 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 Parisian surrealists in New York; and through the 1950s and 1960s, he lived and wrote in Mexico, Morocco, France, Italy, Spain, and Greece.