So what did Lamantia mean when he wrote that he had died in 1945?  Certainly, part of it may have been his break with surrealism.  He had invested a lot of himself into the movement, had defined himself as a revolutionary—both socialist and surrealist—and seeing this movement flounder would have been difficult.  But he did not act like a dead man: he continued to study and investigate other forms of cultural radicalism.