A few weeks back, in the course of talking about what made the poet Allen Ginsberg great (“

McClure was 22 at the time, the youngest of the Beat poets and writers who would send a revivifying jolt through the complacency of American mid-century culture. San Francisco then, he wrote later, was to the arts “what Barcelona was to Spanish Anarchism.”

“Still,” McClure said, “there was no way, even in San Francisco, to escape the pressure of the war culture. We were locked in the pressure of the Cold War and the first Asian debacle – the Korean War. My self-image in those years was of finding myself – young, high, a little crazed, needing a haircut, in an elevator with burly crew-cutted, square jawed eminences, staring at me like I was misplaced cannon fodder. ... We saw that the art of poetry was essentially dead – killed by war, by academies, by neglect, by lack of love and by disinterest. We knew we could bring it back to life.”

McClure was born in Kansas and reared in Seattle before heading to San Francisco State University for a bachelor of arts degree, where he studied with the poet Robert Duncan, another titan who remains underappreciated today. McClure began to dress all in black and, like Johnny Cash, mostly kept at it, but for somewhat different reasons. Asked why once, McClure said, “Those of us who wear black are in mourning for ourselves.”

This is McClure from 1956, in “Premonition,” dedicated to another American original, the poet Theodore Roethke:

Feet burn to walk the mackerel sky at night

And run on ribs that in the clouds appear

Beginning in the heart, I work towards light.

There were many more poems, and books of them, to come, as well as plays and essays, often concerned with nature and with the animal nature of man. After he published his volume “Ghost Tantras,” in 1964, McClure read from it to the lions in the San Francisco Zoo. “We were singing together,” he said later. “They wanted more.”

What the Beats ignited mushroomed in the alternative cultures of the 1960s. Some of them, such as Jack Kerouac, were left behind. Not McClure. He befriended and mentored the Doors’ Jim Morrison, who took McClure as a role model. They didn’t like one another at first. “He had long hair, and I had long hair,” McClure recalled. “He had leather pants, and I had leather pants. But over drinks, we started talking.”

McClure dubbed Morrison the greatest poet of Morrison’s generation, and McClure later toured reading his poems to the accompaniment of Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek. They made you want to snap your fingers, nostalgically. There were no bongos.

McClure also wrote songs, one of which began with the line “Come on, God, and buy me a Mercedes Benz” – which is where Janis Joplin and Bobby Neuwirth got the idea for the song they wrote and she recorded a cappella, in 1970, “Mercedes Benz.” Mercedes-Benz the company, deaf or indifferent to sarcasm, used the Joplin song in a car commercial in 1997, and went on using it with the tag “From $23,000.”

McClure taught poetry for many years at the California College of the Arts, and was a visiting lecturer and writer at Naropa University in Boulder. He died Monday, May 4, at his home in the Oakland hills of California, from complications of a stroke last year. He was 87.