Kenneth Rexroth’s Life Essay, Research Paper

Caren Irr

Rexroth, Kenneth

(22 Dec. 1905- 6 June 1982), poet and translator, was born Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth

in South Bend, Indiana, the son of Charles Rexroth, a pharmaceuticals salesman, and Delia

Reed. Owing to Charles’s rocky career, the family moved frequently throughout the northern

midwest until Delia died in 1916 and Charles in 1919. For the next three years, Rexroth

lived with an aunt in Chicago. After his expulsion from high school, he educated himself

in literary salons, nightclubs, lecture halls, and hobo camps while working as a wrestler,

soda jerk, clerk, and reporter. In 1923-1924 he served a prison term for partial ownership

of a brothel.

During the 1920s, Rexroth backpacked across the country several times, visited Paris

and New York, taught in a religious school, and spent two months in a Hudson Valley

monastery. Reflections on these experiences appear in his later poetry, but his early work

was cubist and surrealist–often opaquely so. In 1927 he married Andr?e Schafer, an

epileptic painter, and they moved to San Francisco. In the late 1920s Rexroth’s first

poems appeared in Pagany, Morada, and Charles Henri Ford’s Blues. He

read much of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy around this time.

During the 1930s, Rexroth studied mysticism and Communism. Readings of Jacob Boehme,

St. Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus influenced revisions to his long poem, Homestead

Called Damascus, published by New Directions in 1963. He also participated in the

Communist party’s John Reed Clubs, organizations supporting working-class writers and

artists. Although skeptical about internal party politics, Rexroth helped organize clubs

on the West Coast until 1938. He corresponded with other leftist poets, such as Louis

Zukofsky and George Oppen, who wanted to save poetry from sentimentality and

impressionism. In the mid-1930s, Rexroth participated in the Federal Arts Projects. In

1936 he spoke at the Western Writers Conference and was published in New Masses, Partisan

Review, New Republic, and Art Front. A long-standing association began

in 1937 when Rexroth’s poetry appeared in the second volume of James Laughlin’s New

Directions in Poetry and Prose. Rexroth would be a lifelong friend, guru, and skiing

companion to this influential publisher.

In 1938 Rexroth shifted his political attention to an ecologically based pacifism. His

first volume of poetry, In What Hour (1940), was tepidly received–a response he

blamed on the literary establishment of the urban East Coast. After Andr?e died in 1940,

he married Marie Kass, a public health nurse who shared his passions for politics and

camping. When the United States entered World War II, Rexroth registered as a

conscientious objector and served as a psychiatric orderly. Objecting to war measures, he

helped a number of Japanese Americans evade internment. During this period, he practiced

Buddhism, Taoism, and yoga.

In 1944 his collection The Phoenix and the Tortoise appeared. The title poem is

a long philosophical narrative interspersed with concrete sensual images. This kind of

earthy Jeremiad was central to Rexroth’s postwar aesthetic. He took the social role of the

poet quite seriously, writing in a 1958 review of Kenneth Patchen’s work, "If no one

cried, ‘Woe, woe to the bloody city of damnation!’ and nobody listened to the few who cry

out, we would know that the human race had finally gone hopelessly and forever mad" (Kenneth

Patchen: A Collection of Essays, ed. Richard G. Morgan [1977], p. 23). In the late

1940s Rexroth established a Friday-evening salon and a Wednesday-night philosophy club to

discuss his theories of politics and poetry; in attendance were friends such as Robert

Duncan, William Everson, Richard Eberhart, Philip Lamantia and, later, Allen Ginsberg,

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and other Beats.

After receiving a Guggenheim fellowship in 1948, Rexroth traveled across Europe and the

United States, making sociological observations that resurfaced in The Dragon and the

Unicorn (1952). During the 1950s Rexroth continued to serve as father figure to the

Beats, partly through a weekly radio show. He also became the biological father of two

daughters; their mother was philosophy student Marthe Larsen. In 1953 he wrote what is

probably his most well-known poem, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," in honor of Dylan

Thomas. A passionate indictment of standardized culture, the poem asks who is responsible

for Thomas’s death; its answer implicates the cocktails and Brooks Brothers suits of this

world. This piece became a standard in Rexroth’s repertoire when, with the Beats, he began

to read poetry with musical accompaniment. Actress Shirley MacLaine attended a

poetry-and-jazz performance in the late 1950s and concluded that Rexroth resembled

"John Donne in the fourth dimension."

After Kass divorced him in 1955 Rexroth legally married Larsen in 1958 (they had been

illegally married in France in 1949); they divorced in 1961. His live-in secretary, Carol

Tinker, became his fourth wife in 1974. In the 1960s Rexroth supported civil rights

struggles and the anti-war movement. His Collected Shorter Poems appeared in 1967

and Complete Collected Longer Poems in 1968. Increasingly recognized by mainstream

critics, he wrote a series of essays for Saturday Review and received a National

Institute of Arts and Letters award in 1964. This later work was dominated by Eastern

philosophy–a theme that appealed to the students he taught at the University of

California, Santa Barbara (1968-1974). Partly on the strength of his translations of Asian

poets, Rexroth won a Fulbright to Japan (1974-1975) and a Copernicus Award for lifetime

achievement. His last major project was a series of poems presented as translations of a

fictional Japanese poet named Marichiko. In later years Rexroth maintained friendships

with younger writers, such as his literary executor Bradford Morrow, and feminist poets

such as Carolyn Forch? and Denise Levertov. Rexroth died in Santa Barbara, and,

characteristically, Catholic eulogies, Buddhist chants, and Beat poems were performed at

his funeral.

Kenneth Rexroth’s distinctive poetic voice emphasized sexuality, ecology, and mysticism

and provided an aesthetic alternative to social realism and New Critical formalism.

Although some feminists have objected to his philandering and dated representations of

women, as a writer and editor, Rexroth generously promoted both male and female radical

writers. His contributions energized postwar American poetry.

Bibliography

Rexroth’s papers are located at the University of California, Los Angeles and the

University of Southern California. Rexroth’s collections of poetry also include The

Signature of All Things (1949), In Defense of the Earth (1956), Natural

Numbers (1963), Elastic Retort (1973), New Poems (1974), and Flower

Wreath Hill (1991). His translations include 100 Poems from the Chinese (1956),

100 Poems from the Japanese (1964), Pierre Reverdy, Selected Poems (1969), Love

and the Turning Year (1970), Orchid Boat (1972), 100 Poems from the French

(1972), and 100 More Poems from the Japanese (1976). His play Beyond the

Mountains was published in 1951. His essays include Bird in the Bush (1959), Assays

(1961), Classics Revisited (1968), The Alternative Society (1970), With

Eye and Ear (1970), American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (1971), Communalism

(1974), and More Classics Revisited (1984). An Autobiographical Novel was

published in 1966. Lee Bartlett, ed., Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected

Letters, appeared in 1991. See Bradford Morrow, "An Outline of Unpublished

Rexroth Manuscripts, and an Introductory Note to Three Chapters from the Sequel to An

Autobiographical Novel," Sagetrieb 2, no. 3 (Winter 1983): 135-44.

The major biography is Linda Hamalian’s A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (1991).

Critical studies include Morgan Gibson, Kenneth Rexroth (1972), Gibson, Revolutionary

Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom (1986), and Ken Knabb, Relevance of Rexroth

(1990). James Laughlin and Denise Levertov wrote a moving tribute to Rexroth after his

death; see "Remembering Kenneth Rexroth," American Poetry Review 12, no.

1 (1983): 18-19.

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