Thomas Merton was one of the most important religous poets of this century, with a remarkable range of expression that embraced both the richness of the liturgical life and the stark clarities of mystical expreinece. He was also a man of letters of an unusual versatility, and the 51 books that he wrote mirrored the breadth of his interests and sympathies. A monk in one of the strictest Catholic orders, the Trappists, he became an ecumenical thinker, and his speculations led him to study Asian religions, which he mastered so thoroughly that Daisetz Suzuki, the best-known interpreter of the tradtitions of Japanese Buddhism, remarked that no other Westerner understood Zen so well as Merton. Merton's sympathies also led him into protests against racialism and against war, and he was one of the leading exponents during the the 1960s of the trend toward social radicalism that was then changing the whole character of the Catholic Church.
