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From the beginning of his career, Patchen has adopted an anti-intellectual approach to poetry.

His first book, Before The Brave ( 1936 ), is a collection of poems that are almost all Communistic, but after publication of this book he rejected Communism, and advocated a pacifistic anarchy, though retaining his revolutionary idiom.

He spoke for a `` proletariat '' that included `` all the lost and sick and hunted of the earth ''.

Patchen believes that the world is being destroyed by power-hungry and money-hungry people.

Running counter to the destroying forces in the world are all the virtues that are innate in man, the capacity for love and brotherhood, the ability to appreciate beauty.

Beauty as well as love is redemptive, and Patchen preaches a kind of moral salvation.

This salvation does not take the form of a Christian Heaven.

In Patchen's eyes, organized churches are as odious as organized governments, and Christian symbols, having been taken over by the moneyed classes, are now agents of corruption.

Patchen envisions a Dark Kingdom which `` stands above the waters as a sentinel warning man of danger from his own kind ''.

The Dark Kingdom sends Angels of Death and other fateful messengers down to us with stern tenderness.

Actually Heaven and the Dark Kingdom overlap ; ;

they form two aspects of heavenly life after death.