George Sterling was, perhaps, the most celebrated of young writers mentored by Ina Coolbrith and Ambrose Bierce, the brightest star of the Bohemian club. He appeared at the annual club gatherings naked and decorated with laurels, causing his best friend, Jack London, to call him "The Greek" and fellow artists agreed that the laurels were deserved.
He was the beating heart of the Bay Area literary community, part of every writing society and club, widely acknowledged by his peers to be the first among them - yet in the rest of the United States he was unknown or viciously attacked as much for the romanticism of his poems as for his simple lifestyle, which involved swimming in the cold ocean, free sex, anarchism, drugs, and paganism.

Sterling did not intend the free sex, in fact he went to Carmel to get away from it, but it just happened. One day you float through majestic redwoods dressed in a filmy tunic arm-in-arm with a beautiful woman, and write love poems in triplicate and the next day, suddenly, there's the free sex.
Paganism, on the other hand, was fully intentional.

Sterling's writing was mystical - perhaps as the result of his time in a seminary, fantastical - perhaps due to immoderate consumption of opium and alcohol, often melancholy - certainly because of his obsession with the transience of life. Jack London, who, perhaps, knew Sterling best, wrote that he tried to "unfold the margin of his life where it was curled".

In 1907 or thereabouts the writers who fled San Francisco after the earthquake to gather around Sterling in Carmel formed a suicide pact. Ambrose Bierce's nephew, a chemist at the Mint, procured cyanide for them. Sterling wrote "peace" on his vial and carried it everywhere saying: “A prison becomes a home if you have the key”.
1908-1918 were tragic years of deaths, attempted murders, and, of course, suicides. One by one Sterling lost friends and lovers, including his wife, Carrie Sterling, and his best friend Jack London. His mentor, Ambrose Bierce, disappeared in Mexico.

Sterling tried to cope with the losses in many ways - moving to New York, drugs, alcohol, WWI activism, completely changing his poetical style - but nothing helped and finally, in 1926, he used the cyanide vial. His death was the final knell for the Bohemians of San Francisco. Although the Bohemian Club still exists the mad romantic whirlwind of creation and death is quieted.


THE CITY BY THE SEA

At the end of our streets is sunrise;
At the end of our streets are spars;
At the end of our streets is sunset;
At the end of our streets the stars.

Ever the winds of morning
Are cool from the flashing sea--
Flowing swift from our ocean,
Till the fog-dunes crumble and flee.

Slender spars in the offing,
Mast and yard in the slips--
How they tell on the azure
Of the sea-contending ships!

Homeward into the sunset
Sill unwearied we go,
Till the northern hills are misty
With the amber of afterglow.

Stars that sink to our ocean,
Winds that visit our strand,
The heavens are your pathway,
Where is a gladder land!

At the end of our streets is sunrise;
At the end of our streets are spars;
At the end of our streets is sunset;
At the end of our streets the stars.