He was raised mainly in Bakersfield, California, where his adopted father, an architect by profession (a fact that figures in many of the poems), had an office. His grandmother had been an elder in a Hermetic order similar to William Butler Yeats's Order of the Golden Dawn. The tales told and read him as a child by his parents and the appropriately named Aunt Fay (the theosophists' world was marked by correspondences) were as lasting and important as any of his later influences and are a constant world of reference in the poems. A high school English teacher, Edna Keough, enabled him to bring into the clamorous world about him the one he knew from childhood. He explained later: "She saw poetry not as cultural commodity or an exercise to improve sensibility, but as a vital process of the spirit." By the time he was eighteen, he had already taken the orders, accepted poetry as his commitment for life: "I recognized in poetry my sole and ruling vocation."
He attended the University of California at Berkeley for two years from 1936 to 1938, publishing his first poems in school magazines, before leaving for New York, where he became part of the circle of Anais Nin (his name appears in her famous Diary) that included Kenneth Patchen and George Barker, an early influence along with Edith Sitwell, Jean Cocteau, and the French Surrealists.
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