KENNETH PATCHEN studied at the University of Wisconsin before working as a millhand and farm labourer. After the publication of his first book of poems, Before The Brave (1936), which led to a Guggenheim Fellowship, he devoted himself entirely to writing and painting.

Kenneth Patchen came to maturity on the tides of socialism and surrealism and became one of the few significant American poets of the Second World War. The tension between his personal mythology, born of European Romanticism, and his direct, blustering, often outrageous nativism, has made for a massive concentration of poetic energy in an extraordinary variety of forms: the short lyric, the impassioned ode, the prose poem, the gnomic utterance, the popular ballad, and many hundreds of little drawings and paintings reminiscent of Blake and Klee.