Kenneth Rexroth Summary

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) (Full name Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth) American poet, translator, critic, biographer, and novelist. Although he disavowed the title, Rexroth is known as the f... Read more

Biography EssayIn The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair described Kenneth Rexroth's place in modern poetry: "Like William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, Kenneth R... Read more

As American as Mark Twain yet more international than Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, for nearly half a century, was a cultural force as an intrepid artist and poet, an adept editor and translator, an... Read more

When Kenneth Rexroth settled in San Francisco in 1927, West Coast writers had already proudly embraced the special experience and beauty of things Western in their decisively American style. In opposi... Read more

Critical Essay by Ruby Cohn [The four verse plays in Beyond the Mountains] are based on extant Greek tragedies, but in form they are modeled on Japanese Noh plays. Like Noh plays, they contain few cha... Read more

Critical Essay by Julian Symons [An Autobiographical Novel by Kenneth Rexroth is a] detailed account of his first twenty-one years by a man who appears to have total recall of almost everything that h... Read more

Critical Essay by Emiko Sakurai Kenneth Rexroth has been trying for decades to accomplish what has been regarded as an impossible task—rendering Japanese and Chinese poems into acceptable Engli... Read more

Critical Essay by Luis Ellicott Yglesias The keynote of The Phoenix and the Tortoise is not autistic guilt, but articulate responsibility. The title poem is a long meditation on "what an essent... Read more

Critical Essay by Donald Hall In Rexroth's poems the natural world, unchanged and changing, remains background to history and love, to enormity and bliss…. His politics of the individual... Read more

In this review of The Collected Shorter Poems, Unterecker finds a self gradually more revealed through the course of Rexroth's career. Reading through all of Kenneth Rexroth's shorter po... Read more

In this brief review of New Poems, Leibowitz finds the poems exquisitely serene. Kenneth Rexroth's New Poems, almost exclusively lyrics like "spindles of light," are concerned wit... Read more

In this essay, Hall encapsulates Rexroth's career, sketching his poetic preoccupations, and speculating on his lack of critical acceptance. In December of this year, Kenneth Rexroth will turn 7... Read more

In this excerpt, Bartlett traces the development of the quest theme through all of Rexroth's long poems. James Wright has written that Rexroth "is a great love poet during the most lovel... Read more

In this excerpt, Gutierrez discusses Rexroth's erotic Love Poems of Marichiko. The Love Poems of Marichiko represents an order of love verse strikingly different in some ways from all Rexroth&#... Read more

In this review of The Phoenix and the Tortoise, Golffing finds a rift between Rexroth's intelligence and his sensibility. Kenneth Rexroth's new volume raises a number of interesting prob... Read more

In this review of The Signature of All Things, Golffing praises the poems for their combination of cosmic feeling and unclouded judgment. When several years ago I reviewed Mr. Rexroth's The Pho... Read more

In the following essay, Lipton takes a hard look at Rexroth's formal and metrical experimentation. In the introduction to his anthology, New British Poets, Kenneth Rexroth observed that "... Read more

In this review, Rukeyser praises In Defense of the Earth. The fineness of Kenneth Rexroth's In Defense of Earth depends on several virtues. They are virtues which are rare in this year but whic... Read more

In the following review, Overmyer offers a favorable assessment of Classics Revisited. John Crow, a witty and wise Shakespearian authority, has said that the difficulty with writing on Shakespeare tod... Read more

In the following review, the critic offers a positive assessment of With Eye and Ear, drawing comparisons between Rexroth and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Azimuth Press has found a gnomon in Kenneth Rexro... Read more

In the following review, Kirby gives a favorable assessment of The Morning Star. The first section of The Morning Star consists of very short poems, glimpses of the natural world with or without the h... Read more

In the following essay. Hamalian compares Rexroth's tireless self-reflection, scholarship, poetic sensibility, and role as cultural spokesperson with that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. One of the cru... Read more

In the following essay, Gutierrez discusses Rexroth's literary career and critical reputation. According to Gutierrez, Rexroth "remains probably the most underrated poet in 20th-century ... Read more