Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt was published by Delacorte Press in 1970 — at the peak of Brautigan’s fame, when he was the unofficial poet laureate of the counterculture and his books sold in the hundreds of thousands. It is his fourth major poetry collection and perhaps his most characteristic: short poems (many only two or three lines), unexpected imagery, a tone that balances between whimsy and despair, and a persistent sense that the world is both beautiful and fundamentally absurd.
The Poems
The title poem is typical of Brautigan’s method: it takes a World War II headline and places it in a context so unexpected that both the headline and the context are transformed. War becomes surreal; the surreal becomes domestic; the domestic becomes cosmic.
The collection includes some of Brautigan’s most anthologized poems — pieces so short they function almost as haiku or aphorisms, yet carry emotional weight disproportionate to their length. Many concern:
San Francisco — the city as lived landscape, its fogs and streets and bars and parks.
Love — specifically the melancholy of love, the way desire and disappointment coexist in the same breath.
Nature — observed with the precision of someone who actually looks at things (rivers, fish, trees, weather) rather than merely using them as metaphors.
The ordinary — Brautigan’s persistent conviction that the most extraordinary poetry lives in the most ordinary moments: eating, walking, watching.
Context
By 1970, Brautigan was enormously famous in counterculture circles — Trout Fishing in America had sold over two million copies, he was invited to readings and festivals everywhere, his face was recognizable. The poetry collections of this period benefited from that fame but also suffered from it: reviewers increasingly dismissed him as a lightweight, a hippie fad, a writer whose simplicity was simplistic rather than achieved.
The critical consensus has since reversed. Brautigan’s poetry — particularly the collections of 1968-1970 — is now recognized as genuinely original work that owes nothing to the academic verse of its era and achieves effects that more “serious” poets cannot.
Collecting Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt
First edition (Delacorte Press, New York, 1970): Slim volume with distinctive cover design. Small format.
Identification points:
- Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence imprint
- “First Printing” stated
- 57 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $75–$200. The large printings of Brautigan’s peak period make his 1970s books more available than the early Grove Press titles.
Signed copies: $200–$500.
The poetry collections are generally less sought than the novels, but serious Brautigan collectors prize them as the purest expressions of his sensibility — undiluted by narrative obligation.