SOURCE: "The Poetry of Kenneth Rexroth," in Poetry, Vol. XC, No. 3, June 1957, pp. 168-80.

In the following essay, Lipton takes a hard look at Rexroth's formal and metrical experimentation.

In the introduction to his anthology, New British Poets, Kenneth Rexroth observed that "On the eve of the second war, the intellectual world generally was still dominated by the gospel of artistic impersonality, inherited from the nineteenth century 'scientific,' 'exact aesthetic,' and the opposed cult of artistic irresponsibility, 'Art for Art's Sake,' Mallarmé, Valéry, Cubism, much Marxism, the dubious 'Thomism' of M. Maritain, T. S. Eliot, Laura Riding, Robert Graves, I. A. Richards, most surrealists—it was almost universally taught and believed that the work of art was not communicative, was not 'about anything.' Instead, it should be approached empirically, from a utilitarian basis, as an object existing in its own right, a sort...