While in Kyoto, Eshleman began what he would later describe as his “apprenticeship to poetry” by translating César Vallejo's Poemas humanos. Simultaneously he begins writing “The Tsuruginomiya Regeneration”: what would ultimately become a 350-page sequence of poems, eventually reedited and published as his book Coils (1973). Alongside his writing and translation, Eshleman studied William Blake, Northrop Frye's book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry, the I Ching, and world mythology. After working for several weeks outside under a persimmon tree inhabited by a large red, green and yellow spider, which subsequently disappeared, Eshleman has a visionary experience involving a spider which he interprets as a totemic gift confirming his vocation as a poet.