I have been fond of Patchen ever since I read his "Journal of Albion Moonlight" in my teens, together with that other surreal masterpiece, "Maldoror" by Lautreamont. They illumined for me the poetic landscape of our century far better than even the work of Eliot, Pound, Stevens or Cummings could, probably because Patchen, for instance, seems an unreflective, lyric poet, a simple visionary, and accepts our period rather than rejecting it, attempting to assimilate and project its images and sounds in all their terrible, dislocating impact—in order to redeem it for us thereby.

This is another way of saying Patchen never doubted that human life is always transcendental, spiritual in a primitive Christian sense, deeply not just aesthetically religious, not for the sake of poeticizing. His work seems never to have been troubled by the schoolboy's hang-ups over rhetoric, forms, traditionally academic problems of statement and communication...