As American as Mark Twain yet more international than Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, for nearly half a century, was a cultural force as an intrepid artist and poet, an adept editor and translator, an outspoken critic and cultural personality. His fourteen volumes of poetry (and an equal number of translated volumes from the French, Spanish, Greek, Chinese, and Japanese), the exhibits of his geometric expressionistic paintings, his cultural soirée for Chicago and then San Francisco anarchists, pacifists, poets, and artists, his maverick criticism of politics, history, literature, art, and popular culture--all combine to make him one of the most forceful and persistent influences on American culture in the twentieth century. Rexroth wrote out of an engaged stance toward social, political, and natural environments with a consciousness firmly grounded in Eastern and Western philosophies. His work maintains a fidelity and clarity that is classical in its sensitive...