SOURCE: "'Poetry Is Vision'—'Vision Is Love': Rexroth's Philosophy of Literature," in Revolutionary Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom, Archon Books, 1986, pp. 32-48.

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."

According to Rexroth's theory and practice, poetry is vision. Poets and critics have often used this term carelessly, but in Rexroth's work "vision" has several definite meanings that cohere in his organic philosophy of literature-in-community.

"Vision," referring to phases of a creative process of consciousness, sometimes means contemplation, in which the poet communed with nature and those he loved, and in which he periodically had oceanic, ecstatic experiences of realization, illumination, or...