This Man is the PoetLoren Eiseley (1907–1977) was undeniably such a poet, a writer whosevoice and eye maintained “contact with the farthest distance” of thespecies’ journey into time, the magnitude and pathos of which he hadcome to know only due to the longing of science and its revelatory power,without, however, abandoning either the personalities of authentic poeticutterance or the burden of the past and the pathos of memory. Eiseley was aprofessor of anthropology (a specialist in physical anthropology), formerlychairman of the department at the University of Pennsylvania, Provost ofthe University, Curator of Early Man at its museum, and the author of nu-merous scholarly articles and fourteen books—ten prose and four poetry(four of which were published posthumously)—reflections, both scholarlyand personal, on subjects like evolution, the natural world, anthropologyand archaeology, the history of science, and literature. But he became aprofessional scholar and academic only by chance.As his autobiographical writing reveals—and in a sense all of his workis autobiographical—throughout his life he believed that he was alwaysabout to be snatched away from his ordinary, tame world into a “worldof violence” far removed from the sober pursuits of the university life forwhich he felt only a dubious affinity. Eiseley came to intellectual venturesrelatively late in life and in a roundabout way after a youth spent, in part, as

ROOTED IN THE ABSENCE OF PLACE3a hobo during the Great Depression. His first book, The Immense Journey(1957), which launched his career as a literary naturalist, was not publisheduntil he was nearly fifty, and as a glance at a bibliography of his work willreveal, he maintained his career as a writer afterwards only with somedifficulty. At times, in the twenty years of his life that remained, he foundit impossible to publish at all. From 1960 to 1969 he did not produce a singlebook.That he ever came to write the kind of books that he did—which havebeendescribedasoccupyingakindofnoman’slandbetweenliteratureandscience—came about almost by accident. Commissioned to do an essay onevolution for a scholarly journal in the 1950s, Eiseley had this project wellunder way when the journal backed out of the agreement. Although he wassuffering from temporary deafness at the time (see “The Ghost World” inAll the Strange Hours [1975a]), he nevertheless decided to attempt insteadsomething more literary—an out-of-fashion personal essay. The ImmenseJourney (1957) was the eventual result, and with it was born his exper-imentation with a form he liked to call the “concealed essay,” in which“personal anecdote was allowed to bring under observation thoughts ofa more purely scientific nature . . . ” (1975a, p. 177). The essayist, Eiseleybelieved, unlike the painter, “sees as his own eye dictates”; “he peers outupon modern pictures and transposes them in some totemic ceremony”(1975a, pp. 154–55).Eiseley had long contemplated a full-fledged career as a man of letters,not as a scientist. As he himself has told us (1975a), it was only after analmost archetypal encounter with an English teacher, who thought oneof his papers too well written to be his own, that he turned finally toscience, his second love, for his primary career. “There are subjects in whichI have remained dwarfed all of my adult life because of the ill-consideredblow of someone nursing pent-up aggressions, or because of words moreviolent in their end effects than blows,” he explains in The Night Country(1971, p. 201). English, and consequently creative writing, were for himsuch subjects. Yet, as Carlisle (1983) points out in a biographical study ofthe author’s development as a writer, Eiseley was a published poet andshort story writer as early as the 1930s, long before he was a scholar and ascientist, and in a sense he remained a creative writer who discovered inthe insights of science the substance of great art.Science,thebiologistHaldaneonceargued,is,infact,morestimulatingthan the classics of literature, but the fact is not widely known for thesimple reason that scientific men as a class are devoid of any perceptionof literary form (Wilson, 1978, pp. 201–202). As Eiseley learned how toapply his essentially literary sensibility to the raw materials of scienceof anthropology—an intellectual activity which, as Levi-Strauss observes,