SOURCE: "Portrait of a Poet as a Young Man: Lucien Stryk," in Midwestern Miscellany XXII, edited by David D. Anderson, Midwestern Press, 1994, pp. 36-45.

In the following essay, Porterfield discusses autobiographical aspects of Stryk's work, in particular his alienation from American culture and his subsequent embrace of Zen Buddhism.

In 1947, two years after returning from the Pacific where he had served during WWII, a twenty-two year old Lucien Stryk published his first essay, "The American Scene versus the International Scene," in a student journal at Indiana University. The article criticizes the climate of post-war America, what historians would later call the attempt at "normalcy" that characterized the peculiarities, even excesses, of the decade immediately after the War.

Conscious of its tremendous strength and its own unblemished virtue, the undefeated champion of the world hangs up its gloves and decides to relapse into its indolent mental habits of sublime...