The Vagabond Scholar

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.