This, “Also F.H. Bradley,” was my first scholarly publication, and in it I see myself reflected in my essence and my youth.

I loved even as an adolescent Eliot’s earworms — who can help it? — but by the time I was writing poetry seriously, in my late twenties, I knew that Eliot’s refusal of philosophy and of Whitman were not for me. They would be friends rather than enemies. This is still true. Modernist autonomy is, for me, a canard.

Where I see my youthful waywardness in this essay is in its idea of the self — that it is alienated because it is a social construct. That assumption, rooted in the endemic Marxism of Berkeley, led me, inevitably, given my spiritual cast of mind, to Hegel and his Christian narrative in Phänomenologie des Geistes. To my credit, I knew it was a trap, and I never gave up on thinking my way out of that trap. It just took me decades to find the teachers I needed.