Kenneth Rexroth Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Kenneth Rexroth

A caustic but erudite commentator on art and politics for more than half a century, Kenneth Rexroth published nineteen volumes of poetry, a collection of verse plays (produced by the Living Theater during its opening season), thirteen volumes of translations from the Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, and Greek, eight volumes of criticism (on subjects as diverse as the paintings of Mark Tobey, the notebooks of Simone Weil, and jazz poetry), and an autobiography covering the first forty-five years of his life. But while his achievements earned him many awards and fellowships, until recently Rexroth was relegated, particularly by East Coast critics, to the rank of a minor writer, one who was on the scene rather than of the scene. With few exceptions, his poems were ignored by anthologists. He did not fit neatly into the so-called high modernist movement, and his accomplishments--which, in retrospect, illustrate the way modernism itself would be redefined by the end of the century--were seemingly overshadowed by younger poets, some of whom had earlier turned to him for advice and encouragement.

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