Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1985
Abstract
No modern poet has been more dedicated to the American West as both place and idea than William Everson. From his first chapbook. These Are the Ravens (1935), to his most recent full-length volume of poetry. Masks of Drought (1981), and his prose meditations, Birth of a Poet (1982), Everson has asked us again and again to understand the power of what he calls the “archetype of the West": “the Western writer stands as term of the American impulse, and as term he constitutes its mainstream rather than a merely peripheral and incidental relevance” (Archetype West 147). While during the eighteen years he spent as Brother Antoninus, a Dominican monk, the poet’s concerns with his region were at times overshadowed by an ongoing conflict between the spirit and the flesh as the religious quest unfolded, it was even then his sense of place which sustained his life and nurtured his art:
One of the deepest needs of the human soul is for centeredness, a focus of coherence and signification which confers meaning on the shapelessness of temporal existence. Of many possibilities perhaps the most basic, after man’s awareness of the family, is the apprehension of his immediate locale .... As such, the recourse to landscape in the need for coherence has from time immemorial elevated man to his most profound religious intuitions. Mountains, valleys, rivers, islands. Always he has looked to the configuration of the world about him for the face of God. ("The Regional Incentive," Earth Poetry 195)
And in the West, it is a face writ large.
Recommended Citation
Bartlett, Lee. William Everson. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1985. Digital. Western Writers Series, 67.