Traces continuity between the shaman's song as it appears in myth, legend, shamanic narratives and ethnographic literature, and mystical, visionary, avant-garde and experimental poetries within the Western tradition. I suggest a poetics of liminality in the ancient epics of Gilgamesh, Inanna and Homer, in the magico-religious philosophies of Hermes Trismegistus and Giordano Bruno, and in the Great Vision of Black Elk, and trace a lineage of poets from the Romantics, to the Modernists, to the Post-Moderns, showing how poetry exacts a continual tension between individual spirituality and...