Kenneth Rexroth Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Richard Foster

Critical Essay by Richard Foster

SOURCE: "The Voice of a Poet: Kenneth Rexroth," in The Minnesota Review, Vol. II, No. 3, Spring 1962, pp. 377-84.

In this essay, Foster analyses a body of Rexroth's work, and finds him a fine lyric poet, especially in his love poems.

When a couple of years ago my pleasure in reading through Kenneth Rexroth's first collection of essays, Bird in the Bush, led me to take an attentive look at his poetry, I was struck by the anomaly that so good a poet had been so ostentatiously ignored by the ruling literary culture of his time. Until I looked into Bird in the Bush I had known Rexroth only as a name connoting a poetry that had never grown up to Auden, a poetry of rabid convictions and shapeless outcries, a poetry skewered in the labor programs of the thirties and yelling ever since. I found that the essays...
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