Philip Lamantia (October 23, 1927-March 7, 2005) was a United States poet and lecturer. Lamantia's visionary poems -- ecstatic, terror-filled, erotic -- explored the subconscious world of dreams and linked it to the experience of daily life. The poet was born in San Francisco to Sicilian immigrants and raised in that city's Excelsior neighborhood. His poetry was first published in the magazine View in 1943, when he was fifteen and in the final issue of the Surrealist magazine VVV the following year. In 1944 he dropped out of Balboa High School to pursue poetry in New York City. He returned to the Bay Area in 1945. The poet spent time with native peoples in the United States and Mexico in the 1950s, participating in the peyote-eating rituals of the Washo Indians of Nevada. In later life, he embraced Catholicism, the religion of his childhood, and wrote many poems on Catholic themes.and his first book was published a year later.