In the following essay, Barber provides analysis of Rexroth's poetry and literary development. According to Barber, "however boldly his personal history carries the impress of beatnik San Francisco and beatific Kyoto, his reckonings with the wilderness bear the telltale marks of Jeffersonian and Emersonian bloodlines."

The poetic theory and practice of Kenneth Rexroth … run counter to the impersonality of much modern literature and criticism…. Rexroth's "progress" as a poet has been a continual revelation of personality, the realization of a selfhood. But he is neither exhibitionistic, like Rimbaud or Lord Byron, nor confessional, like Robert Lowell or Anne Sexton. When he writes about himself, he does so objectively, taking himself for granted. Usually, his attention is fixed on other p...

In the following essay, Gibson examines the evolution of Rexroth's poetic style, literary influences, and conception of personal vision and communal sacrament. According to Gibson, "Rexroth shows that vision is organic consciousness, sympathetic, clear, and steady, communing, communicating, realizing the many in the one, the one in the many, the universality of each being."

In the following essay, Parkinson discusses the poetry and literary accomplishment of Rexroth through examination of The Phoenix and the Tortoise. According to Parkinson, "To Rexroth poetry envisions and embodies life on a scale and grandeur that none of his poetic contemporaries has attempted to reach."

In this excerpt, Bartlett traces the development of the quest theme through all of Rexroth's long poems.

This wide-ranging essay spans Rexroth's career, but concentrates on The Phoenix and the Tortoise as an exemplary 20th century work.

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 American literature."

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.

In the following essay, Lipton takes a hard look at Rexroth's formal and metrical experimentation.

In this excerpt, Gutierrez discusses Rexroth's nature poetry.

In the following essay, Evans examines the significance of Eastern philosophy, particularly the fusion of "Buddhism and anarcho-pacifist attitudes," in Rexroth's contemplative poetry.

In the following excerpt, Barber contends that Rexroth's most poised and mature poetry was influenced by his direct observation of the Northern California landscape.

In his review of In Defense of the Earth and One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, Williams defends Rexroth's unpoetic meter and diction, and lavishly praises his translations.

In the following essay, Hall provides an overview of Rexroth's literary accomplishments. According to Evans, Rexroth's poetry "is a poetry of experience and observation, of knowledge and allusion, and finally a poetry of wisdom."

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

In this essay, Hall encapsulates Rexroth's career, sketching his poetic preoccupations, and speculating on his lack of critical acceptance.

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

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

In this excerpt, Gutierrez discusses Rexroth's erotic Love Poems of Marichiko.

In the following review of The Collected Shorter Poems, Malkoff finds Rexroth a minor poet in the best sense of the word.

In the following review of The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Squires claims Rexroth is held back by adherence to a finicky and zealous formal method.

In this review, Rukeyser praises In Defense of the Earth.

In this review of The Signature of All Things, Golffing praises the poems for their combination of cosmic feeling and unclouded judgment.

In this review of In Defense of the Earth, Creeley sees Rexroth as moving toward more readable poems.

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 essential person must do" in order to deserve the gift of consciousness…. First, one must try to get free of the illusions generated by fear and desire which the state manipulates in order to atomize community into an enslaved collectivity. This can be done by striving to identify and adjust to the abiding patterns, the interlocking rhythms th...

In the following review, Kirby gives a favorable assessment of The Morning Star.

In this review of The Phoenix and the Tortoise, Golffing finds a rift between Rexroth's intelligence and his sensibility.

In this review, FitzGerald finds the poems of In What Hour largely derivative and unexciting.

In the following review, Overmyer offers a favorable assessment of Classics Revisited.

[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 characters in rich costumes, as well as Chorus and Musicians, and each drama is climaxed by a dance. As in Noh plays, too, Rexroth's stage is almost bare, but his language is more profuse in imagery. Rather than the duologues of Noh, Rexroth uses the three speaking parts of Classical drama. The first of Rexroth's plays is calle...

In the following review, the critic offers a positive assessment of With Eye and Ear, drawing comparisons between Rexroth and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[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 has happened to him. It is easy to see why Kenneth Rexroth was regarded almost with reverence by a whole generation of West Coast poets, for he had exemplified in his youth their idea that all life is movement and that all movement should be free…. An Autobiographical Novel is a wonderfully entertaining book. It is also a specifically A...

British readers may have heard of Kenneth Rexroth as a father-figure of the Beats. That role has been exaggerated, even by grateful Beats themselves. Insufficient credit has been granted to Rexroth's identity as an old-fashioned, honest-to-God man of letters of downright independence of mind…. Rexroth and his books are American in a way few people know enough about. He is of the America that can be caricatured or dismissed only through prejudice….

In this brief review of New Poems, Leibowitz finds the poems exquisitely serene.

Kenneth Rexroth has been trying for decades to accomplish what has been regarded as an impossible task—rendering Japanese and Chinese poems into acceptable English verse without losing the effects of the original. And he comes nearer to achieving the impossible with each new volume. [One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese] is a sequel to One Hundred Poems from the Japanese…. The new volume differs from the old in several aspects. With the exception of the haiku and some classic nature poems,...

[Kenneth Rexroth in his Communalism: From Its Origins to the 20th Century] takes the Judeo-Christian tradition rather than the Marxist as his starting point [and] is under no illusions about these modern communes, which he sees as often little more than crash pads for an uncommitted, floating, and perhaps work-shy population, who are merely opting out of the everyday world…. Mr Rexroth writes fluently, but behind his easy style there is more scholarship than he chooses to reveal (there are no footnot...

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 separates him from the mass of Americans—and obviously from Stalinists of the left—and yet joins him to all human beings; it is a politics of love—and Rexroth is the poet of devoted eroticism….

Kenneth Rexroth is in his 70's, and his books and translations are too numerous to number. He has been living in Japan lately, and, Japaneselike, has become a creature of the floating world. He writes [in The Morning Star]:                  Time has had a stop.              &#x...