Bartlett is an extremely fine narrator and expositor; he commands a vast body of material pertinent to Everson’s life and work, and has a fine sense of Everson’s poetry.

The life and poetry of William Everson embody all the aspects of a tradition in American poetry created by Whitman. It is composed in Plain American speech, rather than the language of erudition or neo-European forms or styles; it uses sexually explicit language and ideas and has been constantly involved with the taboo of a celibate man of God taking a wife; it has always presented a democratic point of view. William Everson is one of the most essential and dynamic American poets of the mid-twentieth century.