"The Holiness of the Real": The Short Verse of Kenneth Rexroth

THE HOLINESS OF THE REAL

The Short Verse of Kenneth Rexroth

by Donald Gutierrez

Copyright © 1996 by Donald Gutierrez

Second Edition, Revised

Amador Publishers, LLC, 2014

published by

AMADOR PUBLISHERS

SMASHWORDS EDITION 2015

ISBN 978-0-938513-52-0

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Cover Art: Movement and Stillness by Marlene Zander Gutierrez

Cover Design by Ashley N. Jordan

Lengthy quotations of Kenneth Rexroth's poetry, mainly from The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (1966) and also from Flower Wreath Hill: Later Poems (1991), used with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

First Edition: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996

This Revised 2nd Edition is available in print from Amador Publishers.

THE HOLINESS OF THE REAL

The Short Verse of Kenneth Rexroth

Contents

Dedication

Notes on the Second Edition

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter 1. Introduction: The Crystalline Poetry of Kenneth Rexroth

Chapter 2. Natural Supernaturalism: The Nature Verse

Chapter 3. Eros Sacred and Profane: The Love Verse

Chapter 4. Lost Left Causes and Individualistic Presence in Rexroth's Political Verse

Chapter 5. Concentric Affinities: The Love-Nature Verse

Chapter 6. The Holiness of the Ordinary: The Literary-Social Journalism of Kenneth Rexroth

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

List of Rexroth Poem Titles

About the Author

Dedication

To My Wife

Marlene

who from the beginning inspired passion in the search for truth, found and shared meaning in the mundane of everyday life, and instilled compassion for all living things be they great or small. Her presence touched the hearts of all who came into contact with her.

If anyone ever embodied the meaning of Rexroth's words, the holiness of the real is always there, accessible in total immanence, it was Marlene. She apprehended me (as Rexroth might say), as well as anyone around her, into her reality that elevated us through an insightful purpose wrought from her duality of existence as both a joyful soul for all of life's small wonders and a suffering soul brought about by deep-seated pain. But it was this duality within that guided her nuanced understanding of life and manifested in her a deep desire to contribute and affect the things that matter in positive ways.

Together we searched for truth in this reality we call earth, and, together again, we will continue our search in the next reality, whatever that may be.

In Loving Memory

of Our Parents

Hector and Trajan, 2014

Marlene Zander Gutierrez passed on August 19, 2011

Donald Kenneth Gutierrez passed on October 29, 2013

Notes on the Second Edition

The following abbreviations have been used for these frequently cited works:

AAN Rexroth; An Autobiographical Novel

BB Rexroth; Bird in the Bush: Obvious Essays

CR Rexroth; Classics Revisited

CSP Rexroth; The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth

FWH Rexroth; Flower Wreath Hill: Later Poems

LKR Hamalian; A Life of Kenneth Rexroth

MCR Rexroth; More Classics Revisited

How the Ebook Differs from the print edition:

Endnotes are numbered sequentially from 1 to 79 for the entire book instead of by chapter, and they are hyperlinked.

This ebook does not contain a General Index, as it is assumed readers will search for the names and phrases they are seeking.

A List of Rexroth Poem Titles is included in lieu of the Index by title. Poems that are discussed at length are linked to the relevant primary discussion in the text, however readers are encouraged to search for additional references and quotes. When a short form of the poem title has been used, it appears in parentheses after the poem title.

The epigrams that appear between the Preface and Introduction in the print edition appear above the Preface here.

In a very few cases block quotes have been reformatted as in-line quotations for this Ebook.

All credits of source publication and page number(s) for quoted poetry have been moved from the end of the block quote to the end of the introductory text that precedes it.

Acknowledgments

Portions of this study have appeared in my previously published articles in the following publications. In many cases they have been sizeably altered or enlarged for this book.

American Poetry:

The Beautiful Place in the Mind: Robert Duncan 'Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,' vol. 6, no. 1 (Fall 1988): 31-38.

Keeping an Eye on Nature: Kenneth Rexroth's 'Falling Leaves and Early Snow,' vol. 1, no. 2 (Winter 1984): 60-64.

The Ecstasy and the Agony: 'The Love Poems of Marichiko,' vol. 8 (Fall 1990): 100-15.

Kenneth Rexroth: 'The Signature of All Things,' vol. 7, no. 1 (Fall 1989): 31-37.

Musing With Sappho: Kenneth Rexroth's Love Poem 'When We with Sappho' as Reverie, vol. 4, no. 1 (Fall 1986): 54-63.

The Bloomsbury Review:

The Political Poetry of Kenneth Rexroth, vol. 14, no. 2 (March-April 1994): 23.

Contemporary Literary Criticism (Gale Research Inc.):

Volume 49, pp. 280-83 and 287-89 (two reprinted articles).

The University of Dayton Review:

The Poet's Married Lot: Kenneth Rexroth's the 'Marthe Poems,' vol. 20, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 107-19.

Notes on Modern American Literature:

Going Upstream: Kenneth Rexroth's Lyric 'Time Spirals,' vol. 6, no. 2 (Autumn 1982): 1-3.

The Literary Review: An International Quarterly:

Natural Supernaturalism: The Nature Verse of Kenneth Rexroth, vol. 26, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 405-22.

North Dakota Quarterly:

The West and Western Mountains in the Poetry of Kenneth Rexroth, (Winter 1994): 121-39.

Northwest Review:

The Holiness of the Ordinary: The Literary-Social Journalism of Kenneth Rexroth, vol. 32, no. 2 (1994): 109-28.

Re Arts & Letters:

'The Holiness of the Real': The Poetry of Kenneth Rexroth, vol. 7, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 31-64.

Kenneth Rexroth's Lyric #17: 'The Morning Star,' vol. 20, no. 1 (Summer 1994): 5-12.

Sagetrieb:

Love Sacred and Profane: The Erotic Lyrics of Kenneth Rexroth, vol. 2, no. 3 (Winter 1983): 101-12.

The San Francisco Review of Books:

Kenneth Rexroth's 'The Marichiko Poems,' vol. 12, no. 1 (May 1987): 21, 22, and 44'.

I am greatly indebted to New Directions Publishing Corporation for allowing me to quote a large amount of Kenneth Rexroth's poetry, mainly from The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (1966) and also from Flower Wreath Hill: Later Poems (1991). -- Donald Gutierrez, 1996

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hector Gutierrez and Trajan Gutierrez for their devotion to fulfilling their father's wish to re-issue this work, and to Ashley N. Jordan and Sinead G. Kelley for their invaluable practical assistance. -- Zelda Gatuskin, publisher, 2014

The holiness of the real

Is always there, accessible

In total immanence.

-- Kenneth Rexroth, Time Is the Mercy of Eternity

That which is most real and most true ought to be manifestly

persuasive in and of itself, without anything outside mediating

its authenticity.

-- Margaret Lewis Furse, Mysticism: Window on a World View

~ ~ ~

Preface

Kenneth Rexroth, who died in 1982, was a major American poet. He wrote poetry for over sixty years, and though he had some recognition during his life, it was far less than his work (and especially his verse) deserved. A bohemian, an astute social critic and radical, a transvaluational thinker of sizable proportions, a confabulator, a translator of poetry from half a dozen languages, Rexroth failed to achieve the recognition during his lifetime that he deserved as a poet in part because American literary politics and American culture did not work in his favor (not exactly an uncommon fate for serious poets generally). Ironically much of his best verse was written during a period when academic and literary tastes prevailed that embodied the antithesis of many of the social and artistic values that Rexroth's art and life embodied.

Generally the New Criticism stood for a kind of austere formalism in verse and a conservative polity that Rexroth and others found esthetically arid and politically reactionary. It isolated art and poetry, in particular, from history and society by regarding it as an autonomous object. This procedure allowed for certain intensities of signification being brought to bear on a poem while stifling others. To Rexroth, interaction between art and society seemed cut off by a hermetic, unduly cerebral, critical procedure. This was insufferable to an author like Rexroth who urged that art was a symbolic criticism of values and society.

As a philosophical anarchist and a supporter of such various traditions as primitive and oral verse and worldwide avant-garde poetry, Rexroth stood for a different order of values in art. Unfortunately for him and other artists, the New Criticism dominated the English departments of the country, and was infiltrating key literary journals. To make matters worse for Rexroth, his own brilliant, acerbic polemics helped to make him anathema to the editors of important journals like The Sewanee Review and Partisan Review, Southern critics like Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, and the East Coast intelligentsia. Rexroth, to my knowledge, remains unmentioned as a significant poet in The New York Review of Books and The Nation to date. Eastern poets such as Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, and John Berryman have during the last forty-five years or so received a great deal more critical attention and support than Rexroth did, although, in my estimation, he can be regarded as at least their equal.

As a libertarian radical, Rexroth also witnessed and probably experienced pressures applied to American artists by the totalitarian left, the Stalinist literary hacks, and professional cultural bureaucrats. An active libertarian radical was bound to collide with the increasingly opportunist cadres of Socialist Realism and consequently to be savagely assailed (according to Rexroth himself on his 1950s radio talks), perhaps even denied certain forums for his work. The animosity in Rexroth's 1950s Pacifica radio-station talks and in some of his political verse and journalism from the 1930s on toward Stalinism in all its guises evinces his sharp sense of the deleterious impact of communism on the American artist and its profound betrayal of revolutionary ideals.

In addition Rexroth's 1950s association with the Beat literary movement, though typical of his generous support of young writers and poets, stigmatized him as merely an elderly beatnik (the East-Coast critic Alfred Kazin impudently labeled Rexroth the Daddy of the Beats). This association confirmed the image of Rexroth in some influential quarters of American literary opinion as a West Coast literary buccaneer. Why Rexroth's literary status did not improve when that of the Beats did could be attributed to his alienation from them in the later 1950s. That alienation might have led to a tendency to dissociate Rexroth from the Beats. Ginsberg, the lead Beat publicist, has for years been far more interested in advancing the literary reputation of Jack Kerouac than Rexroth's. Rexroth's mot that if the Beats represented a Renaissance, it was time for the counter-reformation typifies his part in the growing distance between himself and the Beats during those years. Only in the last fifteen years or so of his life did Rexroth's translations of Asian verse gain him some acknowledgment. It was not uncommon, even as recently as the early 1990s, to walk into good bookstores in America and find only volumes of his verse translations and, occasionally, of his lively essays, and nothing of his verse.

This is a great pity, for, as I hope to show, Rexroth is an important poet. He wrote a large number of first-rate poems, long and short. Yet as Lee Bartlett, editor of American Poetry and author of books on West Coast poets and poetics, has written, Rexroth is arguably the most undervalued American poet and essayist of this century, [and has] published over 1,000 pages of poetry, ten volumes of translations from six languages, eight volumes of literary and social criticism, and an autobiography.1

Further, Rexroth was a highly erudite man, although his erudition occasionally hardened into pedantry and intentionally obscure allusions. He was knowledgeable, even well informed, about many subjects not ordinarily within the ken of the average twentieth-century poet or person. His learning, for example, was likely to encompass Roman architecture, 1920s Russian communist factionalism, European Utopist-communal culture (about which he published a book), T'ang poetry, Noh drama, and so on.

All of this knowledge in itself did not necessarily make him a major poet, but it bolstered and enhanced the frames of reference and value of his verse and prose. What seems to have been a basic influence in his poetry was an extraordinary knowledge of and sensitivity to the major verse traditions in human civilization, from Asian to Greek and Roman poetry, from medieval Latin verse (which he says he especially cherished) to modern French poetry. Also Rexroth's youth in the Midwest, the richly bohemian background of his parental and adolescent-orphan surroundings, and his conversance as a man of letters and poet with the worldwide avant-garde lend his verse and prose a marked sophistication, insightfulness, and ease and, occasionally, a certain arrogance and pretentiousness. Rexroth wrote a number of significant long poems, such as Part 1 of The Phoenix and the Tortoise, the book-length The Dragon and the Unicorn, the early The Homestead Called Damascus, and the two relatively long works written in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, respectively, entitled The Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart, as well as the Marichiko Poems (not to mention his set of verse plays entitled Beyond the Mountains, based on some of the Classical Greek tragedies). However he also wrote a good number of excellent short poems that in themselves should accord him high stature as a poet.

Although some critical work has been done on Rexroth's verse as a whole or in general (Morgan Gibson's Kenneth Rexroth [1972] and Revolutionary Rexroth [1986], Linda Hamalian's A Life of Kenneth Rexroth [1991], Michael Davidson's The San Francisco Renaissance [1989] and Kenneth Knabb's The Relevance of Rexroth [1991]), no one to date has focused at book length and exclusively on his short or lyric poems. Rexroth's short poems by and large comprise the subject of this book. However this study is eclectic. I have not commented on every good short poem that Rexroth wrote or that is contained in his Collected Shorter Poems (CSP) because it seemed to me sufficient to deal with a large number of important, representative poems. Rexroth's better short poems are not as widely known as they should be, seldom being anthologized. I felt it a suitable procedure to focus on most of these than to -- rather compulsively -- scrutinize every short poem he ever wrote.

The study begins with a general introduction in which I deal at some length with Rexroth's poetic personae and the important but little discussed issue of esthetic personalism versus impersonalism in his verse. A brief discussion follows of some major influences on Rexroth's verse, Rexroth's prosody, and the career implications of Rexroth's West Coast location, as well as his relation as a poet and social radical to American society. Next come four chapters comprised of four basic subjects in Rexroth's verse: nature, love, politics, and love-and-nature. Each of these subjects bear subtitles that convey the basic theme of the chapter. One virtue that this thematic organization may possess is to underline basic areas and examples of Rexroth's verse in which he so excelled as to give substance and authority to the claim that he is an important poet. His love verse, for example, is outstanding in its purity, economy, and passion of utterance -- qualities that enable it frequently to transcend simple sensual or physical expression. His nature poetry is also remarkable for its extraordinary exactitude of detail, its numinous lucidity, and, almost paradoxically, its crafted naturalness.

These two subject categories alone (love verse, nature verse) are, in Rexroth's poetry, sufficiently distinguished to amaze one that his merits as a poet were not widely perceived or acknowledged during his lifetime. Less known than it should be, his political or ideological verse is also fine, if not always on the level of his best love and nature poetry. Although usually focused on specific events or particular people, the political verse is often sufficiently general to transcend the flux of political issues, and human values above ideological cause become memorialized in Rexroth's eye and ear for the crucial symbolic detail.

Rexroth wrote a fair number of outstanding poems (not to mention important lengthy ones, like The Dragon and the Unicorn and The Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart) such as When We with Sappho, Lyell's Hypothesis Again, The Signature of All Things, Yugao, Falling Leaves and Early Snow, For a Masseuse and a Prostitute, Inversely, as the Square of Their Distance Apart, Toward an Organic Philosophy, Another Spring, August 22, 1939, the Marthe poems, and The Love Poems of Marichiko. This work attempts to do justice to the stature of these and other of his significant poems mainly through close, detailed readings. Rexroth's work has received little detailed commentary and could well profit by more. There is still a need (because of the existence of an audience) for interpretive commentary, especially in the case of a poet as neglected by critics as Rexroth.

The holiness of the real

Is always there, accessible

In total immanence. The nodes

Of transcendence coagulate

In you, the experiencer,

And in the other, the lover.2

The first three lines especially provide a golden thread through many of Rexroth's significant poems. It suggests first a spiritual dimension present in much of the better work, but, importantly, projected in terms of the everyday and the everywhere. The last three lines above amplify the first idea and make it more specific -- if the holiness of the real can include more than love, it reaches an apex in love, and, by implication of the figure latent in the passage, suggests a gamut between which all experience and phenomena stream in Rexroth's superior poems. In this study I try to intimate this transcendent character in selected poems, for one of Rexroth's most distinctive qualities in his verse is the hint of the supernatural in the natural or of the natural as supernatural. Often, however, it is a super- naturalness manifested in the immanent or indwelling rather than in the celestial or religious in the customary sense; it can be as ordinary as an oak tree or a cow or a minute spider, but fully seen and experienced as if for the first time.

The final chapter presents Rexroth mainly as a literary and social critic-journalist. This section not only amplifies Rexroth's qualities as a distinctive, erudite, and embattled mind but also extends the intellectual context for his verse. The chapter, entitled The Holiness of the Ordinary: The Literary-Social Journalism of Kenneth Rexroth, suggests an implicit unity in Rexroth's work seen in his social and art criticism as the numinous in the commonplace and everyday. Usually significant art at least harbors numinosity; however, it virtually glows at the core of Rexroth's best prose and poetry. Rexroth's literary and social criticism indicates the tendency of major poets to impose a poetic and a critical ideology upon their readers not only to support and enhance their own verse but to engage competing ideologies (artistic, social, or otherwise) that they feel endanger the integrity of art, the reputation of artists they like, and ultimately their own work and vision of the good life and society. Further, Rexroth is an absorbing, perspicacious, and quite combative literary and social thinker. Apart from his verse, his prose writings are remarkable in themselves, incisive, tendentious, learned, humorous, brilliant, arrogant, bawdy, extravagant -- they are rarely dull.

However conflicted and disordered Rexroth's personal and domestic life may have been, his poetry and prose cohere to a degree that suggest that his life may have possessed more stability and poise than has been granted. It might even have possessed a little of the stunning serenity of the William Byrd four- and five-part masses that he loved. And if it didn't, his best poems did.

I am indebted to Linda Hamalian's biography of Rexroth and editing of Rexroth's autobiography; to Morgan Gibson's extensive work on Rexroth; to Lee Barlett's Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters; to the general helpfulness of Rexroth's literary executor, Bradford Morrow; and of such Rexrothians as Lee Bartlett, Morgan Gibson, Linda Hamalian, Leo Hamalian, John Tritica, Ed Vasta, and Phil Woods for their ongoing encouragement, as well as to all the journals, reviews, and other publications that published my Rexroth work (listed in the Acknowledgments section of the book). I am also grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Notre Dame and particularly President Emeritus Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh for a fall 1987 scholarship grant that gave me a semester of free time to work on this study, and, finally, to my own school, Western New Mexico University, for five summer grants to pursue Rexroth research and writing. I also want to thank the Special Collections Departments at the University of Southern California (especially) and at the University of California at Los Angeles for permission to use their Rexroth archives.

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Crystalline Poetry of Kenneth Rexroth

The caricature of Kenneth Rexroth as a gnarled proletarian poet found in Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe bears little resemblance to the man who articulated the following ideas:

Finally of course the meaning is that the transcendent and the immanent are not somewhere else. They are the thing itself, not the thing in itself, no occult Ding an sich, just itself. The sacrament is the bread and wine. (American Poetry in the 20th Century)

Man kills himself by defining the indefinable, grasping the inapprehensible. We do not apprehend reality, since this implies an outreaching effort; rather it apprehends us. We are simply in reality. We are in being like fish in water, who do not know water exists. (The Contemporary Writer [Interview])

Sexual love, of course, is one sacramental, one outward, vesture of an inward spiritual reality, and I suppose that is extrapersonalization...[that is] the person is realized in his reflection in other persons, and there is no end to this process...realization of the one in the other constitutes the flow of reality. (The Contemporary Writer [Interview])

These ideas offer perhaps as good an introduction to Rexroth as any provided by a random recitation of his thought, for, though seen at his best in his verse, Rexroth's prose reflections suggest some important dimensions of the mind behind the poetry. The blending in those three excerpts of pithiness and wisdom and plain speech and occasional pedantry are typical of Rexroth. Further they embody important ideas central to Rexroth's creative imagination.

The transcendent and immanent...are the thing itself. In his seminal essay on the poetry of D. H. Lawrence, Rexroth, speaking of Look! We Have Come Through! says, exaltedly: "Reality streams through the body of Frieda, through everything she touches, every place she steps, valued absolutely, totally, beyond time and place, in the minute particular [italics added] (Poetry, Regeneration, and D. H. Lawrence," Bird in the Bush 189). This celebration of life describes Rexroth's own art and mind at their best, that is, his own sacramentalizing (to use his definitional term for poetry) of existence and experience. Man kills himself by...grasping the inapprehensible. Man tries to subdue, conquer, destroy the unattainable, and in the process crushes the thing itself, the precious but vulnerable life-object, lying directly under foot.

To be in reality like a fish in water suggests the influence of Asian philosophy, as well as an increasing authoritative estimation of Rexroth's relation to Asian culture. This relation is put forcefully by Sanahide Kodama: There is no doubt that, among major American poets, Kenneth Rexroth best understood Japanese culture.3 I will return briefly to Asian influences on Rexroth later. I allude to it here to stress not only a major source of the character of Rexroth's thought and verse but also his ability to absorb and re-create it, a point urged by Gordon K. Grigson: Rexroth is the first considerable poet in English to have really absorbed and made his own the dominant qualities of Chinese poetry, its tone and spirit. Pound... Westernized -- or Americanized -- everything he touched [in his Chinese translations]. Rexroth is less imperial, and his ability to learn from the East by yielding to it contributes to his achieving...both naturalness and form, clarity and depth.4

And the definition of reality in communal terms (realization of the one in the other constitutes the flow of reality) underlines the utopist, social-political radical, mystical facets of Rexroth's sensibility. It is certainly not sufficient or accurate to view Rexroth only as an old-time bohemian or libertarian radical or erotic mystic or communitarian (or as a selfish, abusive husband and disloyal lover). He embodied all these things, or, a least, he wrote some poetry from these perspectives of preoccupation and inspiration. This would explain why, in the long run, it is misleading to view Rexroth as only a love or nature poet of politics and community. His work envelops all these dispositions; often they overlap or even coalesce.5 (In the extraordinary middle-period poem When We with Sappho, for example, one beholds a love-nature poem that also functions quietly and serenely as a microcosm of realized community.) Indeed in terms of an oeuvre, Rexroth's multiple dispositions, if not a total unity, are unified sufficiently to make his achievement as a poet compellingly multifaceted and complex. Rexroth had a sophisticated, invigorating conception of the interrelatedness of reality and society, and his sense that human beings in relationship reflect each other and create reality also indicates a thoroughly developed conception of the ideal (and the bad) society in relation to human possibility. This high awareness he brought to bear in the intensified representations of climactic experience that define lyric or short verse.

Rexroth's sophistication has been identified as a key aspect of his verse. Thomas Parkinson has pointed out that Rexroth has his special particular tone, that of a civilized man in a barbarous world, self-conscious and socially aware, speaking in an urbane, ironic voice.6 Parkinson here is talking about a persona or personality construct in Rexroth's world of verse. This persona, one of many in Rexroth (as in that of any complex literary artist), is not necessarily insincere; it represents a stylization of selected and innate traits, ideals and values, and we have only to consider Yeats in such terms to realize how an ambitious modern poet could stage a whole dramatis personae in himself.

Parkinson's idea of Rexroth's persona of the civilized man in a barbarous world is buttressed by Rexroth's arresting notion of H. G. Wells' crucial importance for him. In his An Autobiographical Novel, Rexroth speaks of how his parents' philosophy of caste responsibility was found in Wells' novel The Research Magnificent and how that family outlook explains undoubtedly why it became one of the determinant books in my life (AAN 37). Further in his autobiography, in one of those audacious revelations certainly designed to startle if not outrage, Rexroth claims that Wells was the major influence on D. H. Lawrence, but since he [Wells] had become unfashionable, D. H. Lawrence kept this quiet. All of Wells' novels are concerned with the social responsibility of the artist, the enlightened man, the determinative man. All of them are concerned with the quest for and the usually tragic failure to find what Christians call sacramental marriage (97). He claims further in his autobiography that his parents and The Research Magnificent reinforced in my mind the idea that I belonged to a special elite whose mission it was to change the world...I looked upon myself as one of Plato's 'Guardians' (149-50), though Plato -- particularly in The Republic -- became highly repugnant to Rexroth, who, with characteristic audacious bluntness, states that "for all its beauty The Republic is, h las, an open conspiracy of gentlemen pederasts (Classics Revisited 15).

I allude to Rexroth's once being a Platonic Guardian, a Wellsian elitist, because it provides an important perspective on his self-conception and thus on his poetic personae. Wells' early twentieth-century novel is concerned with a young man who realizes that developing and maintaining civilization is the work of minorities, who took power, who had a common resolution against the inertia, the indifference...of the mass of mankind, and always the setbacks, the disasters of civilization, had been the failures of the aristocratic spirit....Must the ideas of statecraft and rule perpetually reappear, reclothe itself in new forms, age, die...? ...Now the world is crying aloud for a renascence of the spirit that orders and controls. Human affairs sway at a dizzy height of opportunity....What a magnificence might be made of life!7 This is a heady brew for an imaginative youth in the early twentieth century, but my concern here is less with whether Rexroth lived up to his self-appointing civilizational elitehood than with its significance for his verse. (Also the elitist conception, idealistic on the one hand, hints at strata -- not thin -- of arrogance, pretentiousness, and vanity in Rexroth.)

The Wellsian Guardian comes across in Rexroth's work as the sophisticated, erudite Rexroth that Parkinson defines, but it shows itself in another, rather surprising way as well. He felt very strongly that poetry was first and last a mode of communicable experience, rather than a verbal artifact, object, or unstable text reserved for intense or meta-analysis by highly trained literary specialists. Rexroth is one of the prime American champions of communication (as against construction) in poetry: "Imagism was a revolt against a rhetoric and symbolism in poetry, a return to the direct statement, simple clear images, unpretentious themes, fidelity to objectively verifiable experience, strict avoidance of sentimentality. I suppose this is the actual programme of all good poetry anywhere (The Influence of French Poetry on American," Assays 152).

Rexroth has spoken much about poetry as ideally a popular public activity, as heightened discourse that is spoken and shared. This attitude, of course, goes back to oral verse traditions in which poetry was integral to a society's basic self-definition and aspirations. Very much aware of the acute alienation of the modern poet