Selected Poems
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The late Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) is surely one of the most readable of this century's great American poets.
He is also one of the most sophisticated. Like William Carlos Williams, he honed his writing to a controlled and direct language. His intellectual complexity matches Wallace Stevens, his polymath erudition Ezra Pound. He is first among our nature poets. His love poems and erotic lyrics are unsurpassed. Rexroth's Selected Poems brings together in a single volume a representative sampling of sixty years' work. Here are substantial passages from his longer poems: The Homestead Called Damascus(1920-1925), begun while the poet was in his teens; the cubist Prolegomenon to a Theodicy (1925-1927); the philosophical masterpiece The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1940-1944) and The Dragon and the Unicorn (1944-1950); and the meditative The Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart (1967). The shorter poems were originally gathered in In What Hour (1940), The Art of Wordly Wisdom (1949),The Signature of All Things (1950), In Defense of the Earth (1956), Natural Numbers(1964), New Poems (1974), and The Morning Star (1979).Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) spent his teenage years in jazz-age Chicago and hitching around the country. In 1927 he moved to San Francisco, where he played a key role in preparing the ground for the political and cultural ferments of the 1950s and 1960s. Author of more than forty volumes of poetry, essays, social criticism, and translations from seven different languages, he wryly described his main themes as “sex, mysticism, and revolution.”
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