American experimental poet, novelist, painter, and graphic designer.

Itinerant in his youth and only occasionally a student, Patchen worked at many jobs before beginning to write and paint. He published many collections of verse from 1936 on, notably Collected Poems (1968), and several novels, including The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941), Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (1945), and See You in the Morning (1948). He also wrote plays and other works, all of which exhibit a combination of high idealism, abhorrence of violence, isolation from the mainstream of American thought, and shock at materialistic secularism.