SOURCE: "Scanning the Self: The Influence of Emerson on Kenneth Rexroth," in South Dakota Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, Summer, 1989, pp. 3-14.

In the following essay. Hamalian compares Rexroth's tireless self-reflection, scholarship, poetic sensibility, and role as cultural spokesperson with that of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

One of the crucial links between the Beat poets and the other avant-garde movements of the 1950s was Kenneth Rexroth. He served more or less as liaison between the younger generation and modernists like William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. A political activist for most of his life, he championed curiosity in scholarship and experimentalism in the arts and acted as a kind of pater familias for many poets of the '50s. One of his early disciples, Robert Duncan, found in Rexroth a learned poet able to converse as easily about Oriental philosophy or anarchism as about modernist art or jazz, and he admired...