Kenneth Rexroth, poet, critic, and playwright, was a respected mentor of many of the Beats, yet his own literary career reached back three decades before the Beats and continued into recent times in directions rather different from much Beat writing. Rexroth was associated with several literary movements, not just the Beats, and after first championing the Beat writers, he later publicly repudiated what he considered the self-destructive and pretentious elements of their life-styles.

In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Richard Ellman and Robert O'Clair described Rexroth's place in modern poetry: "Like William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth is one of the veterans of American modernist poetry, and, like them also, a natural father-figure. During the Twenties he made his contribution to the literary revolution taking place in Chicago; he then moved to San Francisco, at that time as far from the center of American letters...