The Books o f W illia m Everson

V IC K Y S C H R E IB E R D IL L

“Very few perfect books have ever been written, and very few that
are perfect have ever been printed. One reason for that is the pressure
that inheres in the book as a symbol; it is so great that the individual
. . . cannot embrace the book in its totality.”1 Much of William Ever­
son’s life has been spent in the elusive effort to “embrace the book”
as a symbol. As a poet-printer, he has sought to make the book as
printed artifact speak a single and unequivocal truth—the truth that
artistic wholeness is possible in a diversified and highly fractured,
assembly-line society: “My whole attempt in a pluralistic age is to give
the book a sacral, holistic character, to recover time with it.”12 His com­
mitment to this aesthetic search for wholeness has prompted a re­
markable journey as writer, printer, and prophet of the “San Francisco
Renaissance” poets.
A Californian of Norwegian descent, son of a printer, Everson was
born in Sacramento in 1912. Before World W ar II, he was a farmer-
writer in the San Joaquin Valley. His first publication, a ten-cent pam ­
phlet of short poetry called These Are The Ravens, appeared in 1935.
He also published two slim volumes, San Joaquin (1939) and The Mas­
culine Dead (1942), in the first years of World W ar II. The poet’s
early work is dominated by images of gentle fields, wildlife, and
strong mountain children whose hardiness embodies the continuity of
human life. All that sustains and all that links man to his past pulses
from the fertile earth, mother of poetic art. These early poems, says
Everson in a typically natural metaphor,

are the ravens of my soul,

Sloping above the lonely fields
And cawing, cawing.3

1 William Everson, “The Poem as Icon—Reflections on Printing as a Fine Art,”

Soundings (8 December 1976), p. 7.
2 Ibid., p. 21.
3 William Everson, These Are the Ravens ( San Leandro, Calif.: Greater West
Publishing Company, 1935), p. 3.
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 The holocaust of World W ar II shattered that tranquility which
Everson had achieved in his poetic life in the late 1930s and early
1940s. As a pacifist, he chose to enter the Civilian Public Service Camp
at W aldport, Oregon. CPS camps, such as W aldport’s Camp Angel,
served as alternative military duty for pacifists prior to the outbreak
of W orld W ar II. Established in 1940 by the Quakers, Church of the
Brethren, and Mennonites, the alternative service camps brought non­
resisters of varying backgrounds together for such projects as land
reconstruction, medical research, and hunger relief.4 Everson engaged
in such tasks daily, using free time to organize the creative abilities of
his fellow pacifists. At Camp Angel, he and others established the
Untide Press. The mimeographed publications of the press aimed to
communicate the importance of the pacifist cause and to preserve an
aesthetically effective description of the lives led by members of the
camps.
The first major publications of the Untide Press now in the Univer­
sity of Iowa Libraries are Eversons X War Elegies (1943) and Poems:
mcmxlii (1945). Even in these initial efforts, Everson’s concern with
the book as a totality is apparent. Although mimeographed, X War
Elegies includes line drawings by artist Kemper Nomland illustrating
the poems, and, evidently, the poet felt the finished product worthy
of the signature which he placed in The University of Iowa’s copy of
that volume. These evidences of Everson’s holistic approach to art
reflect his belief that poetry is no longer singularly an aural art, but
is primarily read in silence from the printed page. This change makes
the printing press immensely important, for the visual impact of the
words on the page must substitute for what was once the subtleties
of aural interpretation. The printing is, therefore, an integral part of
the poem’s effect:
From the moment a poem became primarily a thing, an object
on a page, it began to lose the force of its nature. . . . Today the
fate of a poem may be decided by nothing more than its appear­
ance as it is lifted to be read. . ..
Both the poet and the typographer are left with the merest
devices to indicate what is actually a profusion of subtle effects.
In printing, I have tried to maintain the poem’s prime aural
reality.5

4 For more information on the Civilian Public Service Camps, see Floyd E.
Mallott, Studies in Brethren History (Elgin, Ill.: House of the Church of the
Brethren, 1954), pp. 237-244.
5 William Everson, “A Note on the Psalter of Pope Pius XII,” Novum Psalterium
Pii XII. An Unfinished Folio Edition of Brother Antoninus, O.P. (Los Angeles:
Countess Estelle Doheny, 1955), p. xxiii. Hereafter, “A Note on the Psalter.”
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These “merest devices” include not only the typography, but also the
artwork, the weave of the paper, the kind of ink, and the method of
binding. All contribute significantly to the creation of an aesthetically
unified object.
In April of 1944 Everson, typically expressing his concern for the
total effect of the book, wrote to the CPS director about the progress
of the Untide Press projects. Fully aware of the severe shortage of
funds, even for necessities in the CPS camps, the poet felt the paci­
fist-artist cause, as presented in the War Elegies, urgent enough to
warrant the best possible materials and craftsmanship available.

We are starting work on the Elegies and hope to have them

done in six or eight weeks. Nomland came down on an exchange
[of camp members] and designed the books. If press work can
live up to his design, this will be a really unique book not only in
CPS but in these United States—numerous line cuts in the inimit­
able Nomland manner, color work throughout, fine paper, etc. I
have great hopes for this edition.6

Although this expensive plan never materialized, several lower-cost

projects were completed by the Untide Press. In 1944, a revised edition
of X War Elegies did appear. Printed on a handpress by Everson
himself, this edition (a copy of which is now held by the University
of Iowa Libraries) and Waldport Poems (1944) continue to reflect
Everson’s interest in the whole book as artifact.
Everson’s early work illustrates even more about his holistic ap­
proach than simply the importance of visual effect. He further insists
on matching the nature and quality of the presswork to what he judges
as the integrity and seriousness of the subject of the poems. Art which
flowers from a cause as important to him as pacifism naturally dic­
tates masterful press work. He notes in “The Fine Arts at W aldport,”
a pamphlet designed to acquaint readers with the artistic community
at Camp Angel, that “Bad ideas and excellent art are not the most
compatible of bedfellows.”7
The ideas which Everson considers important enough to be included
in the W aldport poems printed by Untide Press reflect upon the way of
life experienced by men living in the camps. In these slim volumes, as

6 William Everson, April 13, 1944. Letter to Harold Row, Director of CPS,
General Board of the Church of the Brethren. Microfilm copy at the Church of
the Brethren General Office Archives, Elgin, Ill.
7 William Everson, The Fine Arts at Waldport (Evanston, Ill.: Brethren Service
Center, 1943), p. 2.
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well as in the collected poetry of The Residual Years (1944), the poet
explores the nature of the tasks performed in the camps:

To sunder the rock—that is our day.

In the weak light,
Under high fractured cliffs
We turn with our hands the raw granite,
We break it with iron . . .

We perceive our place in the terrible pattern,

And temper with pity the fierce gall,
Hearing the sadness,
The loss and utter desolation,
Howl at the heart of the world.8

The emotions resulting from separation of husbands and wives, the

effects of the war on the natural landscape, and the urgency of the
pacifist cause, are fit subject matter for Untide Press:

I, the living heir

Of the bloodiest men of all Europe,
And the knowledge of past tears through my flesh,
I flinch in the guilt of what I am,
Seeing the poised heap of this time
Break like a wave.
And I vow not to wantonly ever take life, . . . .9

The publications of Untide Press speak for the unique position of those
writers, severed from the ties of the world, who published under its
name.
In fact, Everson’s attempt to present a coherent work of art extends
even to the act of naming the handpresses upon which he does his
printing. The name of his first privately-owned press reflects an orien­
tation to nature as the wellspring of his creative powers:

W hen I left the Untide group after the war and took up my own
venture, I decided to call it The Equinox Press. Not only were the
equinoxes my favorite seasons . . . but the name symbolized vividly
the ideal of balance. . . . It caught up in my mind the humanist

8 William Everson, X War Elegies (Waldport, Ore.: Untide Press, 1943), p.

[22], numbering from recto of first leaf.
9 Ibid., p. [8].
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 goal I had set for myself: to live a life of equipoise and moderation
in the context of pure nature.101

In the fall of 1947 Everson wrote “There Will Be Harvest,” a poem

celebrating the founding of the Equinox Press and his move to Berke­
ley. It is the only poem in the poet-printer’s yet published verse that
makes specific reference to the art of the handpress.

There will be harvest, harvest. We freighted the handpress

Out of the hills. Mounted at last in the little room
It waits for the black ink of its being;
And the rich paper, drawn out of Europe, it too hand-fashioned;
The work of the hand, all; the love of the hand in its sure sweep
When the bar pulls over; all about it the touch of a hand
Laid on it with care . . . .
All work of wholeness executes in the enlivened eye: a godly issue.11

In Berkeley, Everson associated with the group of young artists

gathered around Kenneth Rexroth, but he found that the interior equi­
poise he sought to render in the works printed by Equinox Press had
not survived the war. The experience of isolation in the camps, as well
as the ravages on the natural landscape caused by the upheaval, shat­
tered the personal and artistic integration the poet had earlier
achieved. The search for new wholeness, therefore, becomes a domi­
nant theme in the post-war poems.
That theme is reflected in The Residual Years, a collection of pre­
war poems and the poems printed earlier in the mimeographed edi­
tions from Untide Press. Published commercially by New Directions in
1948, the later poems in the volume show a disjunction with nature
and a frustrated search for some comprehensive context in which the
passion of the poet might be ordered. Nature is now inadequate to that
task:

Apart on his rock

The forester sucks his sufficient quid,
And never hears,
At one with the landscape,
That crouches behind its masked firs,

10 William Everson, “Printer as Contemplative,” Quarterly Newsletter [of the

Book Club of California] (1954), p. 52. Hereafter, “Printer as Contemplative.”
11 William Everson, There Will Be Harvest (Berkeley: Kenneth J. Carpenter,
1960). See colophon.
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 Its skeletal snags,
Brooding upon the lost myth
Created once in its unfathomable past
And never regained—
But it wants to,
It waits, it waits,
Its immense obsession—12

One year after the appearance of The Residual Years, Everson pub­
lished his first full volume on the new Equinox Press, A Privacy of
Speech (1949). His readiness and need for a major philosophical
change, however, made that first effort also the last printing to be
completed under the Equinox name. In the Christmas season of 1949,
Everson found a new context for his writing and began learning to
express himself poetically from a radically different philosophical
orientation. That Christmas a friend of Eversons, Mary Fabilli, in­
vited him to attend a midnight mass where the reenactment of the
nativity scene deeply stirred the sensibilities of the young poet. He re­
calls in his “Autobiography” how the scent of the fir trees and the
shepherd statuettes which flanked the crèche impressed upon him a
new “reality” and a deep sense of his own need for a new perspective
on the world around him:

And as I sat in that familiar estrangement of feeling which had

never left me in the Catholic churches, there came to me the
resinous scent of the fir trees. . . . That scene was the only thing I
could seize on with anything like true realization . . . , [and] out
of the greatness of my need I sensed in it something of a verifi­
cation . . . that I need not fear, were I to come to the Christ, that
He would exact the dreaded renunciation of my natural world. On
the contrary, it was of His, His own, of His making. . . . It was
there in the Cathedral . . . wooing me to probe back behind the
façade of appearances . . . to seek for the reality that lay behind
them all.13

As a newly-committed Catholic, Everson’s greatest challenge would

be to integrate the powers of the artist and the powers of the believer.
The attem pt to mediate the Bacchic forces of poetic inspiration and

12 William Everson, The Residual Years (New York: New Directions, 1948),
pp. 15-16.
13 William Everson, Foreword to “Pages from an Unpublished Autobiography,”
Ramparts, 1, No. 2 (1962-3), p. 60.
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invention—first as a convert and later as a monk—led inevitably to
difficulties:

I think that the conflict [between the artist and conventional so­
ciety] is inevitable. The artist himself will find himself on the cross
in society . . . because in that tension between the institutional and
the charismatic, the institutional mentality is . . . suspicious of any
charismatic phenomenon. If you are a mystic today, you get
hauled off to a hospital for observation . . . .14

When the responsibilities of his new faith interfered with the desires
of the artist, Everson gave first priority to his religious commitment.15
Much of the pain of that disciplining process as well as many of the
critical problems raised by the religious priority are clearly expressed
in the writings of the Catholic period.16
Everson’s attempt to work out the implications of his conversion
extend not only into the subject matter of his poetry but, further, into
his handpress work. Upon dedicating himself to the church, he re­
named his press the Seraphim Press. Whereas the Equinox Press rep­
resented the humanistic love for perfect balance struck in the art of
printing, the Seraphim Press was so named for its higher aspirations:

But when I entered the Church, my values, the whole emphasis

of my mind, underwent a rapid and profound alteration. I left
behind the vision of a purely natural balance, and struck out for
the super-natural extremity, the absolute attainment beyond all the
limited attainments of life. I laid aside the work of my humanism
upon which I had been engaged, and took up the first of the
conversion poetry which was ready to print; and because I wanted

14 William Everson, “The Artist and Religious Life: Brother Antoninus, O.P.,”
The American Benedictine Review, XI (September-December, 1960), p. 225.
15 Paul Lacey, The Inner War: Forms and Themes in Recent American Poetry
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), p. 87.
16 The critical problems facing Everson can be further conceptualized along a
Dionysius-Apollo dichotomy. The early poems use nature metaphors candidly to
explore areas of interest to the poet, particularly the ramifications of sexual en­
counter. Many areas of interest could not be so candidly explored, however, when
the poet’s intent was religious. New metaphors were needed. The early period, can,
therefore, be characterized as a period of Dionysian influence in which the un­
harnessed use of the natural landscape prevailed in the poems until the time of
Everson’s conversion. The radically disciplined monastic life then adopted by
Everson required new priorities, new symbols, and self-control of the Apollonian
influence—a force which remained ascendant in Everson’s writings until approxi­
mately 1969. Since Everson’s reemergence into secular life, the Dionysian influence
is again evident, especially in “Tendril in the Mesh” (1973), where the erotic
imagery is but slightly tempered from its former, pre-Catholic character.
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 to dissever myself from the psychology of my past, and to make
a testament to the great things of my new discovery, I decided
to change the name of my press.17

Everson continued printing while serving at Maurin House, a

Catholic worker house of hospitality in Oakland. There Seraphim
Press published Triptych for the Living in 1951. It is illustrated with
woodcuts by Mary Fabilli, making apparent, as the colophon indi­
cates, Everson’s continued insistence on seeking a unified effect
through both the meaning and the appearance of the words:

. . . and indeed the book [Triptych for the Living] in its design
looks back toward the primitive church in search of a model ap­
propriate to the apostolic character of the text.18

That same year Everson entered the Dominican Order as a lay

brother, taking the name of Brother Antoninus. He again changed the
name of his press, this time to St. Albert’s Press in honor of the Domin­
ican priest revered in the house in which Everson lived. No longer
seeking to print his own work but wanting to find a handpress task
which would necessitate his personal immersion into the monastic
community of workers, Everson began searching for a text worthy of
the serious and perfect skill of a whole community of dedicated broth­
ers. No text seemed more appropriate for such an ambitious endeavor
than the new translation of the Psalter recently completed at the di­
rection of Pope Pius XII. Everson became convinced that God had
called and equipped him to do this specific labor of devotion:

[He] had led me to the handpress, and instructed me in its craft,

and brought me to the Order where I might work, and then had
given me the work . . . .19

Everson and the Dominican brothers worked on the printing of the

Psalter in their spare time for two or more years. The task, so intri­
cately and thoughtfully conceived, proved more formidable than was
originally thought, however, and the work was never completed. In
May of 1955, to celebrate the fifth centennial of the first appearance
of a separately-printed psalmody (1457), Everson published the first

17 “Printer as Contemplative,” p. 52.

18 William Everson, Triptych for the Living (Oakland, Calif.: Seraphim Press,
1951). See colophon.
19 “A Note on the Psalter,” p. xv.
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and only folio. It is introduced with a lengthy “Note” detailing the
kind of ink, paper, and binding used in the printing. As the “Note”
indicates, it was a project attempted with only the most thorough
preparation and by the most highly skilled craftsmen available, for
“No poetry of earth has ever surpassed the Psalter in nobility of utter­
ance, nor dealt with such intensity of man’s exaltation in God’s fulfill­
ment, nor the deep abjection of his Fall.”20
Everson found that the challenge of the Psalter project did provide
a deep immersion into the contemplative community and aided him
in the many adjustments he faced as an artist there. It did not, how­
ever, engross all his concentrated life. In spite of institutional pres­
sures and the enormous effort demanded by the Psalter, he published
a significant body of poetry during those years.
Everson’s first Catholic work, “At the Edge” (printed, 1952; pub­
lished, 1958), is an exploration of the poet-seeker’s encounter with the
vast unknown of the subconscious. The poem urges the reader to move
from the darkness of that realm into the exposing light of God:

There is a mark, made on the soul in its first wrongdoing, and

that is a taint;
And the mark of that taint, it must either widen or wane—
As the soul decrees in its inclination so will it be.21

The radiance of God’s presence is similarly the subject of two other

brief poems written in Everson’s early years as a Catholic poet, “A
Fragment for the Birth of God” and “An Age Insurgent: Poems by
Brother Antoninus.” The “Fragment” is a seven-line poem celebrating
the significance of the Christ-child’s “little cry” and the triumph of
the Holy Mother. “An Age Insurgent” like “At the Edge” is an attempt
to stir the reader to be on the offensive for his Christian commitment.22
These short religious poems preceded Everson’s first lengthy volume
published commercially as a brother, The Crooked Lines of God
(1960). That volume, Everson has explained, is arranged in three
parts, “each corresponding to a particular phase of spiritual develop­
ment, and each dominated, more or less, by the psychology of a par­
ticular saint.”23 The three saints, Augustine, Francis, and Dominic, rep­

20 Ibid., p. xiii.
21 William Everson, At the Edge (Oakland, Calif.: Albertus Magnus Press,
1958), 11. 1-3.
22 William Everson, An Age Insurgent: Poems by Brother Antoninus, O.P. (San
Francisco: Blackfriars Publications, 1959). See letter accompanying the volume.
23 William Everson, The Crooked Lines of God (Detroit: University of Detroit
Press, 1962), “Foreword,” p. [2]. Hereafter, The Crooked Lines.
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resent both a chronological and a spiritual journey; the poet moves
from the spirit of Augustinian repentance and renewal in “Out of the
Depths” to the Franciscan ethic of work in “In the Crucible.” There,
Everson recalls, “already the cramp was setting in. . . .”24 The prob­
lems of attuning his naturally spontaneous and individualistic person­
ality to the form of his new religious priorities and convictions had not
been solved. The poet’s creative drives were at war with his religious
aspirations, and the devotee quieted the poet within. The tension
which resulted from this inner war is sustained in The Crooked Lines
until it is synthesized in the third and final section of the book, “Out
of the Ash,” by the contemplative Dominican spirit which, Everson
notes, moved him toward,

Not peace, certainly, rather a new crucifixion. . . . By 1954 the

poems, which had thinned to a mere trickle, choked out alto­
gether, stopped.25

The physical rigors of the monastic life and the discipline of attempt­
ing to “keep the lines straight” brought the volume to a close earlier
than the poet originally expected.
Everson continued, however, to pursue integration of the creative
and the religious selves throughout the early 1960s, as is apparent in
his second major Catholic work, The Hazards of Holiness (1962). In
that volume the poet seeks integration of the many areas of his life
through the writing of poems in a Jungian context, a structure which,
Everson notes, reveals “the struggle to make myself comprehensible to
myself. . . .”26 He prefaces many of the poems with a dream recollec­
tion, a passage of Scripture, or both.
The Hazards of Holiness is divided into three sections which further
reflect Everson’s understanding of that interior struggle. “Friendship
and Enmity” traces the seeker’s path from darkness to the light of
God. But this path leads to an even more desperate striving—a wres­
tling with the inner demon who is so deceitful that he is often mistaken
for God Himself. That wrestling is the subject of many of the poems
in the second section, “The Dark Face of God.” The poems in “Love
and Violence,” the third and closing section, speak of the triumph of
love through the violent struggle of the seeker determined to cling to
his God:

24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 William Everson, The Hazards of Holiness (New York: Doubleday, 1958),
p. 7.
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 Where the kites are shrieking
There reeks the carcass.
Where the treasure is sunk
There cowers the heart.
Having done such things in the green wood
W hat will I do in the dry?

Have pity on me, have pity on me,

At least you my friends,
For God hath touched me.27

Everson’s dedication to his faith was continuing to pose difficulties for

him poetically; the landscape with which he was once so familiar no
longer met his poetic needs. In The Crooked Lines and The Hazards
of Holiness he sought for institutionally acceptable metaphors which
would at once admit his spontaneous images and also communicate
the religious intent of the poem. Such difficulties do not plague Ever­
son in the privately-printed volumes of this period, The Blowing of
the Seed (1966) and In the Fictive Wish (1967). W ritten in 1946,
but not published until just after The Hazards of Holiness, these poems
contrast sharply in their use of metaphor with that in the religious
poetry. Drawn from the physical landscape, the earlier metaphors more
naturally express the content of the poems. Unlike the two major vol­
umes of Catholic poetry, these poems do not strain to remake the
passion with which they are concerned into poetry readily accepted
by the religious community. That passion which is the subject of The
Blowing of the Seed and In the Fictive W ish is the passion for whole­
ness found in the sexual encounter.
The Blowing of the Seed details the meeting of a Nordic man and a
Mediterranean woman; the “cold encrusted man” is associated with the
wintry seasons while the woman is from the “deep equatorial zone”
and represents the warmth of the earth. In the same way that the
harshness of late winter is tempered by the suggestion of warming
spring winds, so also the man, a remnant of the glacial age, is tempered
and softened by the loving fervor of the southern woman. The use of
the nature metaphor greatly increases the sensuality of the passage:

I move to meet you now in a greening time.

I come with wind and with wet
In a soft season.

27 Ibid., p. 88,11. 12-17, 21-23.

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 I bring you my hand.
I bring you the flesh of those fallow fallen years
And my manifest reasons.28

Everson’s skill in appropriating the natural landscape as metaphori­

cal background for poetry dealing candidly with sexual encounter is
most evident in this early verse. It is a much more difficult task, how­
ever, to transform the erotic passion poetically into holy desire, as
Everson does in this passage from The Crooked Lines, written some
16 years later:

My Lord came to me
In the deep of night;
The sullen dark was wounded with His name.
I was as woman made before His eyes;
My nakedness was as a secret shame.
I was a thing of flesh for His despise;
I was a nakedness before His sight.29

Everson’s religious poetry of the late 1960s accordingly tries with

increasing concentration to explore the potential of the religious meta­
phor. That potential is developed in The Rose of Solitude, published
in 1967 by Doubleday. In this poem a monk, the man of God, en­
counters Rose, the woman of the world. The narrative asserts that,
though these two people could have acceded to archetypal sin, they
manage through the strength they gained in avoiding evil not only to
remain sinless but to achieve a kind of deliverance and wholeness
greater than either possessed previously as individuals.30 Like The
Crooked Lines, The Rose of Solitude attempts to deal with erotic
statement clothed in an institutionally-acceptable religious language:

In the stigmata of His gaze her love coils like the flesh on its iron,
the love-ache of the opening.
W hen she utters the Holy Name you would never doubt God
died for the love of men.31

By contrast, the early work published alongside The Rose of Solitude

can deal with the erotic expression directly:

28 William Everson, The Blowing of the Seed (New Haven: Henry W. Wen­
ning, 1966), Part vi, 11. 1-6.
29 The Crooked Lines, p. 60,11. 1-7.
30 William Everson, The Rose of Solitude (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1967), “Foreword,” pp. x-xi.
31 Ibid, 11. 16-19.
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 Water-woman,
Near water or of it,
The sea-drenched hair;
Of gray gaze and level
Mostly he knows her;
Of such bosom as face would fade in;
Of such thigh as would fold;
Of huge need come to; .. .32

This particular poem, In the Fictive Wish, also marks Everson’s return
to privately handprinted work after nearly a decade of commercial
publishing. The slender volume carefully observes Everson’s holistic
theories of art: the short lines of the poem are placed carefully within
wide margins and great solicitude is taken to secure unity of typeset
and paper weave. Finally, the poem is illustrated with an unusually
delicate woodcut.
The Last Crusade (1969), a handprinted folio volume from this
late Catholic period, a copy of which is now held by the University of
Iowa Libraries, was designed and printed by Graham Mackintosh.
The skillful presswork and handmade paper contribute to the total
effect of the volume—that of communicating an ultimate kind of re­
ligious experience through poetry. The Last Crusade is less concerned
with achieving a perfect union of subject and metaphorical vehicle, the
hope of publications such as those released by the Untide and Equinox
presses, than with capturing the nature of that religious experience in
the book. Everson described the writing of this poem as an act which,
in itself, changed and healed him, and he replied to the critical attacks
on his handling of the imagery in The Last Crusade with the almost
apologetic remark, “I cannot claim that a spiritual or therapeutic suc­
cess guarantees a corresponding aesthetic one.”33 The religious influ­
ences so pervasive in Everson’s life during this time persuaded him that
the passion for balance, lifted to idolatry, can kill the poet; this is the
theme of The Last Crusade. In the poem, a holy man is killed for laps­
ing into mere self-gratification. Since, by implication, the poem can
become a form of self-gratification to the poet, it too may have to be
sacrificed in order that he may attain a higher spiritual goal. That sac­
rifice does not, however, require the lowering of presswork or artistic
standards in the crafting of the book itself. Indeed an experience as
raw and devastating as that which was endured by the knight in The

32 William Everson, In the Fictive Wish (Berkeley: Oyez Press, 1967), p. 9, 11.
35-42.
33 William Everson, The Last Crusade (Berkeley: Oyez Press, 1969), “Fore­
word,” p. 23.
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Last Crusade, as well as one as transcendent and liberating as that
enjoyed by the poet who escaped the knight’s doom, deserves the fin­
est in skilled handprinting.
That vision of spiritual purity and devotion which Everson had so
relentlessly pursued led him, perhaps more to his surprise than to
others’, away from the monastic life and back into the world. Tendril
in the Mesh, handprinted in 1973, details the poet’s psychological
withdrawal from the contemplative life and his entrance back into
secular life. One year later Everson commercially published Man-Fate:
The Swan Song of Brother Antoninus (1974), the longest poem of
which is “Tendril in the Mesh.” Everson wrote of that poem:

[It] is a love poem sequence, a cycle of renewal, but it also

concerns the monastic life, from the point of view of one who has
renounced it.34

The long struggle to remain within the boundaries of what is ecclesi­

astically acceptable writing dissolves in Man-Fate, and Everson no
longer is compelled to couch passion in religious images. He speaks of
his decision to leave the solitary life as a kind of return to his poetic
home, to a context into which he more naturally fits. And, just as the
lovers in A Rose of Solitude achieved a kind of spiritual deliverance
by remaining true to their original loves, so the poet is delivered from
damnation as he returns to his spiritual home:

Whoever forsakes his element

Is ludicrous, and in his perverse
Exacerbation, damns his own eyes.35

Everson wrote “Tendril in the Mesh” while still a member of the

religious order. He read the sequence for the first time on the after­
noon of December 7, 1969, at the University of California, Davis.
Having completed the reading, he publicly stripped off his religious
habit, fled the stage, and returned to private life.36 Since this event
and his marriage in the following year, the poet-printer has continued
to write prolifically and to supervise work on the handpress.
Much of his recent writing has involved the preparation of various
introductions and explanations for texts of Robinson Jeffers’s work, in­

34 William Everson, Man-Fate: The Swan Song of Brother Antoninus (New

York: New Directions, 1974), p. vii.
35 Ibid., p. 40, 11. 24-26.
36 William Everson, Tendril in the Mesh (Aromas, Calif.: Cayucos Books,
1973). Broadside.
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cluding introductions for Cawdor, Medea, and Californians. Perhaps
the most extraordinary of Everson’s lifelong attempts to create the uni­
fied or “sacral” book, in fact, involves the printing of Jeffers’s Granite
and Cypress: Rubbings from the Rock. Every aspect of the poetic con­
tent, the landscape against which the poems were written, and the
nature of the poet himself has been taken into account in the design­
ing of this artifact.
Everson has based his conception of Granite and Cypress on the
assertion that the true purpose which Jeffers found in life following
the extreme disillusionment the poet suffered as a result of World W ar
I was effected by his handling of stone—“the direct physical labor in­
volved in building Tor House and the fabled Hawk Tower.”37 The
book is a collection of all the poems which Jeffers wrote “under the
impact of stone.” The design conceived by Everson calls for the
lengthy Jeffers line to be extended in the text exactly as the poet in­
tended. And, to avoid boredom on the blank versos, a special process
was developed whereby each is printed with a reverse imprint of the
recto, forming a kind of shadow used to enliven the left page. The
paper for the Jeffers volume was handmade in England, and the type
was specifically chosen to support the subject m atter—“stark, glyptic,
truly abrasive, recalled the feeling of perceptive readers that . . . to
experience his language is to suffer his awful accessibility to the ele­
ments.”38 The binding of Granite and Cypress is laced with deerskin
rawhide from the California coast, and a slipcase “fashioned of Mon­
terey Cypress, with a window of granite from Jeffers’ stoneyard (rock
drawn by the poet’s own hands from the sea) . . . brings together the
book’s archetypal duality: the permanence of granite wrapped in the
enduring presence of cypress.”39
Everson’s edition of Granite and Cypress speaks eloquently to his
desire to write and print books of poems that are, as physical objects,
works of art. As a poet, he seeks substantially to integrate the implica­
tions of his beliefs into his works, regardless of the vicissitudes of the
critical climate into which they come. He continues to sculpture his
poetic language to meet the needs of his philosophical poetry; he be­
lieves that the message his poetry communicates is as important as the
sound of the lines, the appearance of the text, the appropriateness of
the image. He insists on integrity between the poem and the poet’s
life in the world as well as between the poem and the printer’s con­

37 Robinson Jeffers, Granite and Cypress: Rubbings from the Rock (Santa
Cruz, Calif.: Lime Kiln Press, n.d.). Broadside by William Everson, p. 1.
38 Ibid., p. 2.
39 Ibid.
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cerns. As a poet-printer whose struggle to remain whole in a highly
specialized and helplessly fractured world has produced much moving
poetry bound in volumes of consummate craftsmanship, Everson has
continued to “embrace the book.”

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Title page of a collection of poems printed at the University of California at
Berkeley in an edition of one hundred copies. The initial letters “y” and “d” are
printed in red on the original page, which measures 11 ¾x 8 inches.

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Opening of “Elegy X” from X War Elegies by William Everson, issued in mimeo­
graphed form as the first publication of the Untide Press, Camp Angel, Waldport,
Oregon, in 1943. From a copy in the University of Iowa Libraries.

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