In the late 1950s, Doyle wrote Sapphobones, a collection of playful and evocative love poems, which cemented his literary reputation.

Words like mad exotic birds fluttering from my thorax whipping my speech -- moist and gaudy feathers gone from my lips upward.

and in your sleep I awake here have eaten an orange have gone to the creek and bathed listening to its thin and liquid speech its joy to run so free and clean Now, returning to this ragged tent sanctuary to your sleep, your real sleep, I wish for you waking so that we together could take cool pause at the hidden pond I found down stream our bodies quick and chilled by the water, our bodies breathing - holding His work appeared alongside that of Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Allen Ginsberg in the Summer, 1958 issue of Chicago Review, which was devoted to "San Francisco Renaissance" writers.

He adored the works of John Keats, Emily Dickinson and the great 'projective verse' of Charles Olson.

Doyle was a mainstay of the North Beach literary scene in San Francisco from the late seventies until his incarceration in Laguna Honda hospital for dementia and the effects of diabetes.