The Galapagos experience overwhelmed him, but in return it gave him a sense of inner expansiveness, of belonging to something infinitely grander than his tiny, individual self. "The beauty of the Galapagos is constantly tripping you up—the sea lions leaping up at you, the hawks blinking right down at you, the blue heron walking right up to you. You cannot stay caught up in your own problems; you have to start noticing. The creation is simply there, and it's fine being simply there, and fine in its magnificence, just as it is. And when you accept the idea that this creation is fine in itself, you must entertain the possibility that you are also fine as you are. You, too, fit exquisitely in the creation. This involves a sense of humility—you have to be open to it; you can't control it—but also a kind of self-confidence and compassion for yourself. You realize that you belong in the world, that you're a son or daughter of this creation."

If writing poetry requires the ability to focus intently on the world, to pay attention, then the foray to the Galapagos was, as Whyte says, "part of my apprenticeship into the adult epoch of my life." But before getting back to poetry, there were still years of detours—other travels, other jobs, other places, including the sojourn at the nonprofit on the island in Puget Sound. Part of the reason for delay was fear. As he's written, "Poetry tugged and beckoned to me to move in its direction, but I hadn't the faith for the final step of making myself visible. How was I to make a living at it, for God's sake? The question seemed to stop everything in its tracks. If you want to meet terrifying silence, tell the world you are going full-time as a poet."

Despite the pronounced lack of enthusiasm from the outside world, it does seem to have been Whyte's own mythic destiny to write poetry, but more specifically to share it with large audiences, in the way that bullfighting was for Manolete. As a young boy looking out over the Yorkshire countryside, Whyte had often had the recurrent, odd fantasy of himself on stage speaking to a large group of people for a long period of time. "I was really fascinated by this image as a child, and I used to ask myself, what would I be talking about that would interest people enough to give me the time to talk about it?"

In a sense, Whyte seems a throwback to the poets and storytellers of ancient, preliterate societies, who not only transmitted culture from generation to generation, but knitted people together in a particular time and place by giving them a shared history and sense of identity. In our atomized, flattened, often anonymous culture, populated by isolated little monads sitting alone in front of computer screens typing mostly crude messages to other isolated little monads in front of their computer screens, Whyte does seem to have something of that same bardic talent for joining people together. Poetry spoken aloud seems to draw on a wellspring of deep, almost indefinable, feelings, perceptions, and meanings that flow through both poet and audience. "Every poet needs a listening ear," he's said. "You're not just speaking to yourself: you're speaking to another person—a spouse, a lover, a child, a society, to future populations."

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