SOURCE: "Poetry of Vision, Poetry of Action," in The Southern Review, Vol. VI, No. 2, Spring 1970, pp. 572-79.

In the following review of The Collected Shorter Poems, Malkoff finds Rexroth a minor poet in the best sense of the word.

Kenneth Rexroth creates a world that has much in common with May Swenson's. Both poets see the universe, and themselves as part of it, as intricate combinations of essentially meaningless monads; both return insistently to sensuous, frequently sensual, modes of perception with which to penetrate the abstractions the human mind imposes upon reality; both use poetry as the means of exploring and coming to terms with being. But Rexroth, far more self-consciously philosophical, is more explicit in his search:

 The order of the universe
Is only a reflection
Of the human will and reason.
All being is contingent,
No being is self-subsistent.
("They Say This Isn't a Poem") 

 What...