(Born Lewis Barrett Welch Jr.) American poet.
While Welch was never among the most celebrated figures of the Beat Generation, in the years since his death his work has gained recognition as the product of a particularly talented and tragic writer. As Samuel Charters has observed, Welch shared the Beat reverence for nature and the mysteries of life, and he “expressed all of this…with an intensity and bitter rage that left him hollowed out and too worn to live at age forty-four but that also left a group of poems that are among the purest and the most precise of all the Beat creations.”
Welch was born in 1926 in Phoenix, Arizona, the son of Lewis Barrett and Dorothy Welch. Welch’s mother belonged to a wealthy family; his father was a man of limited financial means who turned to embezzling from his wife’s family’s bank, where he had been given a job. Lewis and Dorothy Welch separated in 1929, at which time Welch moved with his mother and his sister to California, and then relocated within the state frequently over the course of the next fifteen years. In 1945, after graduating from high school, Welch enlisted in the U.S.
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