Kenneth Rexroth Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Thomas Evans

Critical Essay by Thomas Evans

SOURCE: "Kenneth Rexroth," in American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal, eds. Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty, Macmillan, 1995, pp. 97-101.

In this excerpt, Evans explicates the influence of Buddhist philosophy on Rexroth's work, particularly in the poem "On Flower Wreath Hill."

In the Avatamsaka Sutra (Avatamsaka means 'flower wreath', the inspiration for Rexroth's poem "On Flower Wreath Hill") occurs the image of the "Jewel Net of Indra", in which reality is likened to a net, each knot of which can be compared to a "jewel" or the perspective of an individual human being, which is reflected in all the other "jewels" or perspectives. Our separate perspectives are thus bound together by a single infinite law. By contemplation on the interdependence of all the other "jewels", rather than by selfish introspection, one becomes bound to them on an intuitive level; in Rexroth's words, everything is "in its place, the ecology / Of...
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