Triumph of the Particular

...A less personally revealing but nevertheless true poem (about a mirror that Rexroth found in an old summer house) is "The Mirror in the Woods": A mirror hung on the broken Walls of the old summer house Deep in the dark woods...

...Except for the first 23 poems, which represent the poet's most recent work, the present collection is arranged chronologically...

...Moss covered the frame...

...He lacks the brilliance of such 20th-century earthshakers as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams...

...At last we came, Breaking the sagging door and Letting in a narrow wedge Of sunlight...

...still another denounces judicial murder in Boston as the poet speaks to Vanzetti: "Some day mountains will be named after you and Sacco...

...He notes, for example, how lights from a yacht passing in the harbor "jewel for a moment" his girl's "windblown hair," and suddenly he becomes aware that "On the desert coasts of the Antipodes./Mountains slide silently into the sea...

...One poem pays tribute to those who died in the San Francisco General Strike...

...How good, in fact, is Kenneth Rexroth...

...For instance, the word "broken," at the end of the first line, creates a suspension that considerably accentuates the word "Walls" at the beginning of the second line...

...The image not only suggests the precariousness of the poet's life (T...

...It is the work of a man of great humanity and integrity...

...Stephen Stepanchev, author of American Poetry Since 1945...

...Rexroth's moral position is sound, but one sometimes has the uneasy feeling that his villains and demons are the unexamined stereotypes of political caricature: tycoons, blood-suckers, Moloch-worshippers, et al...

...he lacks their masterful fusion of ideas and subject matter, of incident and feeling, and the sort of technique that makes lines and whole poems reverberate through the consciousness of a generation...

...We took the mirror Away and hung it in my Daughter's room with a barre before It...

...Once in A long time a wood rat would Pass it by without ever Looking in...

...He might be surprised to learn that Marianne Moore could tell him a thing or two...

...It is this sense of the linkage between the present and the future, this sudden opening out onto vistas, that constitutes an enduring aspect of Rexroth's vision...

...another is called "Requiem for the Spanish Dead...

...The "I" character describes moonlight, starlight, birds and deer while noting changes in the landscape...

...S. Eliot would have called it an objective correlative to his fears, perhaps) but also establishes a relationship between the near and the far, the seen and the unseen...

...Glimpses of him can be caught in such poems as "The Advantages of Learning," "Pliny????iX, XXXVI????lampridius—XXIX," "Only Years" and "For a Masseuse and Prostitute...

...It is an authentic record of the tensions and "saving illusions" of our time...

...but one sees Rexroth developing his forceful, rhythmic, free-form technique and moving out to a discovery of America while making unusual and characteristic juxtapositions...

...His vision is of the "chain of dependence which runs through creation...

...Rexroth is most alive when he projects unique, identifying experiences...

...The poem reflects Rexroth's commitment to a natural, intrinsic symbolism and his avoidance of myth...

...One day The gold and glue gave way and The mirror slipped to the floor...

...how, for example, a fire has gutted a farmhouse nearby...

...Actually, Rexroth is less pessimistic than Jeffers????far less indifferent to the fate of mankind and more optimistic toward the future...

...Later he advises his daughter not to give up her love of nature "For the blood-drenched civilized/Abstractions of the rascals/Who live by killing you and me...

...The poems of the 1930s are the work of a spirited poet who is outraged by oppression, injustice and war and who feels himself part of a movement toward human betterment...

...The lines represent units of thought or feeling or attention, and sometimes the last word in a line hovers for a moment????giving the effect of a semi-comma????before the poet moves on to the word at the beginning of the next line...

...In these he is reminiscent of such contemporaries as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Muriel Rukeyser...

...He tells them they are not alone, that others have fought for the same ideals and future generations will gratefully remember them...

...Thus he has a poem in which he describes his daughter Mary asleep in moonlight????it is a tender, touching scene????and then he sees her in the context of newspaper headlines: "Far/Away in distant cities/ Fat-hearted men are planning/To murder you while you sleep...

...Some of the poems of the 1920s are crudely and flashily experimental in the style of the Jazz Age...

...It also shows his characteristic modulation of the free-verse line...

...For many more years it stood On the shattered boards...

...But he is very good and a pleasure to read...

...This sense of the interdependence of all things is evident also in the poems of the 1940 decade and later...

...is Professor of English at Queens College...

...The effect is a kind of diary record of the perceptions, exaltations and depressions of an engaged man...

...Nothing Ever moved in it but the Undersea shadows of ferns, Rhododendrons and redwoods...

...But Rexroth's best poem of the 1930s is "Toward an Organic Philosophy...

...Brilliantly realized, it is about a camp-site in the Coast Range of California in springtime...

...Here the poet is intensely aware of the dual nature of reality, which can offer, on the one hand, the grace and beauty suggested by a dancing girl and, on the other hand, the shadows, rats and moss of the dark woods...

...This remarkable poem draws a striking contrast between the career of the mirror in the woods, where it reflected shadows, rats and moss, and its position in the room of the poet's daughter, where it sees a girl dancing, learning the intricate steps of the ballet...

...His analysis lacks psychological resonance...

...Superficially, this advice seems to be like Robinson Jeffers', who tells his twin sons in "Shine, Perishing Republic" that they should keep away from the corruption of city life and stay close to nature...

...they reflect the tensions, illusions, disappointments, loves and sorrows of a man who has not only a private but also an active public life, who sees his personal joys and pains in a context of public good and evil...

...Led into meditation about continuity and novelty, he decides that "The relationship of stone, ice and stars is systematic and enduring...

...A similar impression is evoked by a poem about a moonrise in the autumnal Berkshires: The poet thinks of lovers who will be "walking along the hill crests" in the future, after 100 years or more...

...His other poems of the period cover corruption in Nanking and the revolutionary ferment in the interior provinces of China, economic troubles in America, Fascism and the beginnings of another world war...

...Well, he is obviously a vigorous, gifted poet who has written a number of attractive poems that come authentically out of lived experience...

...Now it reflects ronds, escartes, Releves, and arabesques...

...The best poems are based on the least pretentious autobiographical materials, representing the triumph of the particular over the universal...

...As a matter of fact, these are among his strongest poems...

...Occasionally Rexroth writes a ballad or a song in traditional measures, but for the most part, he writes free verse????wisely, since it is here that he excels...

...The poems really move and, in the marvelous way of true utterance, those that are most deeply rooted in particular places and times speak most surely across the decades...

...In the old house the shadows, The wood rats and moss work unseen...

...he seems to be unaware of the darkness within every man and to lack an understanding of the relationship between personal and public morality...

...Like Whitman, he is a poet of cosmic consciousness...

...Rexroth begins by focusing on something small or personal and then suddenly widening his view to unexpected dimensions, bringing in the horrors of the public life...

...He does not write in the "breath line" of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley (he came on the scene long before the Black Mountain poets made their mark), yet he breaks his lines as effectively...

...In "From the Paris Commune to the Kronstadt Rebellion," Rexroth praises the revolutionaries who "die at bridges, bridge-gates, and drawbridges...

...If the mirror is equated with human consciousness, one can see that the poet is also saying that the world exists independently of his perceptions of it: The terror and beauty are always there, even when unperceived...

...when, for example, he confesses to error or failure or inordinate desire...

...WRITERS & WRITING Triumph of the Particular By Stephen Stepanchev The publication of The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (New Directions, 348 pp., $7.50), offering much of the poet's work of the past five decades (his Collected Longer Poems will be published by New Directions in the near future), invites an assessment of virtually a career...

...The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth is truly an important book...