In William Bronk's key poem "The Abnegation" written the start of the 1970s (which boldly begins, "I want to be that Tantalus, unfed / that my want's agony declare / that such as we want has nothing to say to the world") Bronk is beginning to accept a world he feels is somehow not real even as he is crying out in agony over his ontological and perhaps epistemological dilemma, and he is setting himself outside of it. His earlier work laid out his idea of "worldlessness" (typified in the title of his 1964 book The World, the Worldless); his seventies poems show him coming to a personal crisis within this construct, as he strives to establish an objective authenticity, yet knowing that no objectivity is possible. By the end of the decade, which was punctuated by major surgery and a fierce struggle to keep on living (attested in his poem "Life Supports"), Bronk has become less passionate about his exile from reality and at the same time more clear. In his later poems his rhetoric of doubt, which was always the heart of his writing, continues on in a more distilled language, and his acceptance of worldlessnes, which increasingly is aligned with his inevitable death, comes ever more to the fore. This paper will trace the trajectory of Bronk's self-positioning vis-à-vis his intellectualizations, which at heart involve his idea of a real world beyond human grasp, showing the seventies as a particularly rich and painful period for Bronk, and arguing for this period as being pivotal in his career.