SOURCE: "The Transcendental Redoubt," in Times Literary Supplement, April 30, 1971, p. 499.

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

The Azimuth Press has found a gnomon in Kenneth Rexroth. Even his style tends towards the gnomic, ranging the heavens of literature from China to Peru: "Don Quixote, The Tale of Genji, The Dream of the Red Chamber, the Satyricon, these are the world's major works of prose fiction." Or of D. H. Lawrence: "He is certainly one of the major poets of the twentieth century, along with Guillaume Apollinaire and William Carlos Williams." Or: "So the fifty odd stories in The Farmer's Daughters, the collected stories of William Carlos Williams, are amongst the most precious possessions of the twentieth century in any language."

The claims sound heady; but this is part of the intoxication...