This edition of The Dream and Drink of Freedom is a second one — the greater part of the first edition having been burned in 1952 during the McCarthy period. Selected poems have been added to the original, so that the poetry here spans the years between 1942 and 1986.
Johnny Dolphin left home for the first time at the age of 14 and has been traveling since. As a young man he lived and worked in Oklahoma, California, New York and Chicago. After JFK’s assassination, he left the U.S. to live in Africa, Asia, and war-torn Vietnam, where he divided his time between Buddhist scholarship and stringing for a news correspondent in Saigon. When he finally returned to the U.S. it was with an unequivocal vision for both his own future and the planet’s — a vision that led to one of the most creative periods of his life: founding a theater company and beginning a series of ecological projects that continue to this day.
The poetry is divided into six sections, each alluding to a period in Dolphin’s life and in history. Influenced by Blake, Whitman, Joyce, Burroughs, Brecht, Baudelaire, Mayakovsky, and Khayyam, the work is so restless, energetic, and intense that it truly shimmers on the page.
-
Why this book matters
- A collection that survived censorship — the first edition was burned during the McCarthy era, making this second edition an act of literary resistance
- Spans 44 years of poetry (1942–1986) across six sections, each mapping a period in both a life and in history
- Written by a man who lived in Oklahoma, New York, Africa, Asia, and Vietnam before founding a theater company and inventing Biosphere 2
- Influenced by Blake, Whitman, Joyce, Burroughs, Brecht, Baudelaire, Mayakovsky, and Khayyam — restless, energetic, and shimmering on the page
- A rare document of a visionary life lived at full intensity across some of the most turbulent decades of the 20th century
