Considered by some to be a self-exiled hermit, he nonetheless welcomed visitors to his home, but did nothing to court publicity or expand his literary career or reputation.
As a student there in the late 1930s, he worked on the college humor magazine Jester with a classmate who became a close lifetime friend, Thomas Merton.
"[6] The 1962-67, correspondence of Lax and Merton, written in a kind of comic argot, covered his early years in Greece and was first published as A Catch of Anti-Letters in 1978.
In 1990 he received an honorary doctorate from St. Bonaventure University, a Franciscan institution near Olean, and became its first Reginald A. Lenna Visiting Professor of English, spending three weeks giving readings on campus.
During his final years on Patmos, Lax was the subject of Nicolas Hubert and Werner Penzel's 1999 film, Why Should I Buy a Bed When All I Want Is Sleep?
[12] Lax wrote hundreds of poems and dozens of books in his long career,[13] but never reached the level of recognition that some of his peers say he deserves.
Jack Kerouac, whom he knew in New York, called Lax "one of the great original voices of our times ...a Pilgrim in search of beautiful innocence".
[15] Over the years following the composition of Circus of the Sun, Lax's poetry became more and more stripped down to essentials, concentrating on simplicity and making the most out of the fewest components, a technique common to artistic minimalism.
[16] Lax certainly shared an interest in artistic procedures with his friend Ad Reinhardt and reflected that artist's series of black paintings in his own "Homage to Reinhardt": black/black/black// blue/blue/blue// black/black/black/black// blue/blue/blue[17] Specialist presses supported such gestures and brought out limited editions, such as the series of hand-written color poems that appeared as silkscreens from Edizioni Francesco Conz.
In an interview with Nicholas Zurbrugg, Lax later commented on his adoption of minimalist abstraction that "conversations with Reinhardt, and his directions in painting, certainly had an influence on my writing.
"[20] On another occasion he explained the creation of thin vertical columns of a few numbers or a single capital letter[21] as arising from the wish to adopt the methods of abstract painters, "trying to find what the essence for me of a traditional poem is, and getting it down to that.
[24] Karen Alexander comments on Lax's 1985 "Dark Earth Bright Sky", in which just those four words are repeated in different permutations: "We could not be more familiar with the simple contrasting elements in this poem, but we often allow the clutter of our lives to obscure our awareness of them.
[25] And Ryo Yamaguchi, in drawing a parallel between Lax's poetry and the minimalist procedures in the art of Donald Judd and in the music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, also acknowledges the overlap into spirituality characteristic of the latter two.
[26] In the blurb for 33 Poems, William Maxwell, who had worked on The New Yorker with the poet, is quoted as commenting on Lax, "To the best of my knowledge, a saint is simply all the things that he is.