The Vagabond Scholar
Poems of My Life and Thought in Several European Lands
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2026
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Publisher's Description
William Franke wrote these poems full of youthful inspirations in lyrical verse in the 1980s after completing an MA degree in philosophy and theology at Oxford University. Leaving Oxford, he embarked in the summer of 1980 on the “grand tour” of Europe in the tradition of British aristocrats from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. He followed the footsteps of the archetypal French vagabond poet, Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891). Sojourning in Italy among young Italian friends, he learned Italian by total immersion like a child. The poems are situated mostly in Italy and France—which he continued to traverse as he hitchhiked across the continent. His life as an itinerant poet concluded when he returned to the US to teach and eventually entered a doctoral program in comparative literature (PhD, Stanford, 1991). The poems record challenging worldly experiences being processed through religious reflection to forge a personal spiritual vision. They are a testament of personal growth in consciousness mediated by literature.
Endorsements (3)
“The Vagabond Scholar is wisdom transposed into infinite texture and oceanic memory. It is consummate and ineluctable poetry made of intimacies and images compressing time and place, sheltering the deep and pure. Here we find perfect words beneath sunlit words formed from motion and music. William Franke’s poetry excavates the interior mercies that beckon bodies to be embraced. This collection is a gift of companioning, of that exquisite and sacred seal uniting mind and heart.”
“William Franke wrote these lyrics on the cusp of his doctoral studies, as he finished a master’s degree at Oxford and then traveled through continental Europe. Collected here for the first time, these poems reveal how the ‘inward hours’ of study and the vivid experiences of life abroad shaped one of the great humanists of our day.”
“William Franke’s writing, even in its academic mode, has always been poetic because it has always concerned itself with what animates but never finalizes itself within language. That Franke has been writing poetry his whole career is no surprise. Here we get a collection of early poems written on the move that anticipate, and perhaps unsay, all the later academic work. Beyond speech, there is silence, and beyond silence, there is poetry.”
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