istance, but he longed for, and eventually discovered, an end to its pursuit.He would not, I think, have agreed with Louis Thomas’ (1979) suggestionthat it is the poets who will lead us “across the longer stretch of the future,”taking over after the scientific mind has completed the exploration of the“near distance” (p. 87–88). Fond of Thomas Love Peacock’s assertion that“a poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community” whose“march of...intellect is like that of crab, backward” (Eiseley, 1970, p. 123),he remained convinced, both temperamentally and philosophically, that“the soul in its creative expression is genuinely not a traveler, that the greatwriter is peculiarly a product of his native environment” (p. 124). Thoughhe may be the singer of the distance, the caller of the species’ journey intothe vastness of time, the song, if we could but hear it right, speaks foreverof homecoming