Among the most prominent Beat poets as well as the most prolific, William Everson inaugurated his poetic career almost two decades before that group began to take shape, having his first volume, These Are The Ravens, published in 1935. By mid-1957, when Kenneth Rexroth--an early advocate of his work--named him in the pages of Evergreen Review as a major figure of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance and of the Beat Generation, a dozen volumes of his verse had appeared. Unlike most of the Beats, who first began to create their mature poetic voices during the school's gradual coalescence, Everson (or Brother Antoninus, as he then called himself, having emerged in 1957 from a seven-year monastic retreat from which he returned to active participation in the literary world) possessed a firm sense of his own place within a tradition. It was a sense tempered by an already long and strenuous poetic...