Poet who hung out with elite but never quite won acclaim

HAROLD NORSE: WILLIAM Carlos Williams once wrote to Harold Norse, who has died aged 92, that "you are the best poet of your generation".

Often associated with the Beat writers, Norse began publishing in the early 1940s, befriending and collaborating with leading 20th-century literary figures, among them WH Auden, James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg. The author of 12 books of poetry, Norse was nominated for the US National Book award in 1974, but never achieved the success of his more celebrated peers.

Born Harold Rosen (a surname he later rearranged into Norse), he grew up in a poor Brooklyn neighbourhood in New York. His mother, an illiterate Lithuanian immigrant, had lost touch with his father by the time her only son was born. In 1938 he earned a bachelor's degree at Brooklyn College where, the following year, he and Chester Kallman, his boyfriend, winked at Auden at a poetry reading. Kallman and Auden became lovers and Norse worked briefly as the poet's secretary. Remaining in Auden's circle for some years, by the early 1940s Norse was something of a literary Leonard Zelig, blending in and out of artistic circles.

A talented writer in his own right, he cultivated an extraordinary number of relationships, both personal and professional. In the early 1940s Norse met Ginsberg on the subway in Manhattan and became friends with Baldwin in Greenwich Village. He also spent a summer with Tennessee Williams as the playwright put the finishing touches to The Glass Menagerie, and survived drinking sessions with Dylan Thomas in 1950. He was awarded his master's degree at New York University the following year.

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Between 1960 and 1963 Norse lived in Paris with William Burroughs, Ginsberg and Gregory Corso in the Latin Quarter hotel known as the "Beat Hotel". Although initially wary of the Beat writers' literary credentials, Norse collaborated with Brion Gysin on the cut-up technique and was briefly an acclaimed painter of ink drawings soaked in the hotel bidet, known as Cosmographs. After travelling to Greece (where he met Leonard Cohen) and north Africa (where he struck up a friendship with Paul Bowles), Norse returned to the US, settling in California. There he became friends with the writer Charles Bukowski and began bodybuilding with the then unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Norse's move to San Francisco in 1972 resulted in a productive spell. In 1974 City Lights, the publisher and bookshop founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, released Hotel Nirvana, Selected Poems, 1953-1973, to critical acclaim. After the publication of Carnivorous Saint: Gay Poems, 1941-1976, Norse was feted as one of America's leading gay poets. This was followed by Harold Norse: The Love Poems, 1940-1985, and his final volume, In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems, 1934-2003. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: a Fifty Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey, was published in 1989.

Although Norse received support and acclaim from writers including Anais Nin, Burroughs and Bukowski, his work did not bring him the financial rewards or literary acclaim he craved. Norse described himself as a "lone-wolf" and he refused to join the pack, at some cost. In many ways he was more "Beat" than the Beats: Jewish, illegitimate, homosexual, Norse was an outsider who quietly produced some startling and technically accomplished verse from the fringes of the US literary scene.

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