Philip Lamantia was born in San Francisco in 1927, the only child of Sicilian immigrants. As a boy he wandered into the San Francisco Museum of Art and found the paintings of Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí, and the strange, dreamlike world of Surrealism took hold of him for life. He was writing poems by the time he was a teenager, and in 1943, at fifteen, he published his first ones in View, a Surrealist magazine in New York.

He went east, met the Surrealist painters and writers who had fled the war in Europe, and was taken seriously by them, a teenager from the far edge of the country writing in their language. His first book, Erotic Poems, came out in 1946. Then he went home to San Francisco, where something new was starting.

Lamantia became part of the San Francisco Renaissance, the circle of poets that would soon meet the Beats arriving from New York. On October 7, 1955, he was one of the poets at the Six Gallery reading, the night Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl” in public. Lamantia, characteristically, didn’t read his own poems that night. He read the work of his friend John Hoffman, a young poet who had recently died.

His own poems were stranger than most Beat writing, and more mysterious: full of visions, magic and the occult, of dreams and desert light. He was a restless traveler, through Mexico, where he lived among the Cora people and took part in their peyote rites, and through Europe and Morocco. Over the years his Surrealism turned toward mysticism, and in later life toward a deep Catholic faith.

Many of the Beats owed him a debt. He had shown them, years before Howl, that a young American poet could write from the unconscious and the dream, and could open a poem like a door. He died in San Francisco in 2005. His collected poems, gathered in 2013, show the whole strange arc of a life spent following the imagination wherever it went.