Biography Essay

In The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair described Kenneth 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 fatherfigure. During the 1920s 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 as one could get without leaving the country, and was joined there during the 1940s by other anarchist poets who fomented the San Francisco Renaissance, and during the 1950s by the Beats who had fled from New York, all of whom found in Rexroth an openminded and enthusiastic sponsor."

Rexroth's ancestors included German scholars, German-American radicals, and American Indians. He was born in South Bend, Indiana, but his family moved...