A Rexroth Retrospective

...There are other times when myth and reality are completely irreconcilable, as in Rexroth's hate-ridden account of England, coming so strangely after he had just edited an anthology of the British poets...

...And this in fact is what Rex-roth does at his best...

...Here, it seems, the two aspects of the poet that carry on the dialogue in earlier works are reconciled...

...An Autobiographical Novel is, one presumes and hopes, only the first installment...

...As day dawns, the argument ends and "the problem is suspended...

...This potential too often ends in the weakness and evasion that causes scholars to be killed and Jews massacred...

...Even more significant, his best work is indelibly stamped with the experience of life in and beyond the Western deserts and mountains he crossed in youth to find the California that has been his home for the greater part of his years...

...His poetry is filled with passages of abstract philosophizing, condensed and admirably aphoristic...

...In poems like "Requiem for the Spanish Dead" and especially "Towards an Organic Philosophy," the pattern of the most attractive kind of Rexroth poem is established: The writer visits a scene that has special meaning for him, a particular beauty and links with memory...

...The Phoenix and the Tortoise" has the frame of a single night at an encampment where desert, sea and running sweet mountain water come together...

...Under each Pebble and oak leaf is a Spider, her eyes shining at Me with my reflected light Across immeasurable distance...

...I often wonder whether among the present younger poets there are any likely to handle the craft with such clarity, such naturalness, and such splendid art...

...This is my country...

...Put into poetic terms, what has been forged is a supercharged imagism in which every physical object, every scene, every picture the poet creates, is loaded with burdens of meaning that cannot otherwise be expressed...

...Bird and man, the individual Discriminate, the self evalued Actual, the operation Of infinite, ordered potential...

...It also seems dated—as many of the poems from The Art of Worldly Wisdom do, and as Rexroth's best works from 1940 onward certainly do not...

...in which the perceived landscape is transfigured by the mind that it in turn transfigures...

...For him, one part of the United States provokes a poetic response...

...Now in his middle 60s, he is assembling his oeuvre, and at the same time giving his life the shape he thinks appropriate in his memoirs...

...it is a tour de force, momentarily astonishing yet leaving no lasting impression...

...poetry and philosophy of the Far East...

...But it must also be seen against the background of the poet's final image—his wife coming up the beach, nude, with the sun filling her hair...

...Still, there is an air of precocity about them...

...From that unfortunate encounter, so irascibly rendered, it is a long step to the sheer and serene beauty of Rexroth's last long poem, "The Heart's Garden, the Garden's Heart," written in Kyoto in 1967...

...The time is the winter of 1949-50...

...He says in "The Dragon and the Unicorn": As long as we are lost In the world of purpose We are not free...

...In retrospect, they are all extraordinary pieces for so young a man to have written, already complex in philosophic patterns and sophisticated in experimentation...

...as it lights The moon and glorifies the sea And deep in the empty mountains melts The snow of winter and the glaciers Of ten thousand thousand years...

...This of course is the general paradox of poetry, that abstract concepts must be expressed concretely, while the strongest statement is made by suggestion...

...In 1967 The Collected Shorter Poems (New Directions, 352 pp., $7.50) appeared, placing Rexroth's 40-odd years as a poet on view as a whole...

...One could (and perhaps one day I shall) write an entire essay on these magnificent episode and memory poems, in which the long ago and the present flow together and illuminate each other...

...In "The Dragon and the Unicorn," the poem's frame is, as I have said, Rexroth's trip to Europe in 1949-50...

...In the two volumes which form his literary retrospective, Rexroth emerges as one of the major poets of our time...

...The conceptualizing mind and the experiencing sensibility are fused, and out of the fusion there appears a unique contemplative intensity...

...But it is The Collected Longer Poems that are my more immediate subject, and in them too, at least in the three most recent of the five, the illuminating episode is important...

...This power to create meaningful landscapes for the mind is shown splendidly in his great mountain poems...

...In What Hour, published in 1940, was the book in which it began to sound...

...Yet among American poets Rexroth is remarkable for his absorption—perhaps more than any other, with the rather special exception of T. S. Eliot—of a variety of European influences, from Guillaume Apollinaire to the English poets of the 1930s...

...Coming up the road Through the black oak shadows, I See ahead of me, glinting Everywhere from the dusty Gravel, tiny points of cold Blue light, like the sparkle of Iron snow...

...For example, the earliest of the long poems, "The Homestead Called Damascus," belongs to the same period as Rexroth's earliest volume of shorter poems, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, roughly bridging the decade of the poet's late teens and early 20s...

...All that back there is illusion...

...Kenneth Rexroth is returning from the long postwar trip to Europe which became the frame and to a great extent the substance of his longest poem, "The Dragon and the Unicorn...

...This is especially the case with "The Homestead Called Damascus...

...and in which what the eye sees is the microcosm of what the mind embraces...

...But it is always when Rexroth presents his perceptions of truth through images drawn from the knowledge of his five senses that they are most moving and, for me at least, most convincing...

...He has overlaid these early plunderings with the gleanings of a middle age largely spent in studying the George Woodcock, a frequent contributor, is the author of The Writer and Politics, Anarchism, and, most recently, The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell...

...And later: The illuminated live Always in light and so do Not know it is there...

...So Rexroth tells us, and in a sense he is right, but only if we understand that poetry most effectively presents its generalities indirectly, through the transfiguration of experience...

...In the context of this statement we can see that Rexroth conveys most perfectly the sense of liberation, and most surely projects into our minds a signal of truth, when he is being most personal and specific...

...What is revealed is a poetry of increasingly personal intensity, a heart moved by anger and love, a mind of extraordinary range and content, and undeniable greatness...

...It is not simply that he belongs to the same tradition of angry and generous rebellion as Walt Whitman, the same tradition of native utterance as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams...

...In those early years, the poet is finding his way, experimenting, taking and rejecting influences...

...As the clouds Scatter and the just-risen sun Breaks out and lights up the mountains, The landscape turns blue and silver And pale wintry gold, with tatters Of clouds hurrying to the Edges of the sky...

...This is the prime reality...

...The Dragon and the Unicorn" is, in bulk, the major part of Rexroth's most recent volume, The Collected Longer Poems (New Directions, 320 pp., $7.50...

...This is precisely because, though reason leads inevitably toward despair, experiences make both despair and hope irrelevant in the everlasting present, where, through the concrete image, man sees himself swimming toward the egret that guards the harbor's entrance...

...But it is merely promise that is there, waiting for the catalyst that will bring fulfillment...

...It seems likely that for Rexroth, as for so many of us in that time, the catalyst came in two doses, the Spanish Civil War and World War II, and that the emotions aroused by these events brought forth the particular voice we have long come to recognize and to listen for...

...I suspect what it is, And kneel to see...

...The longer poems—and even some of the shorter ones—are virtually dramatic dialogues between the conceptualizing mind and the experiencing sensibility...

...These poems are in their way speculative treatises embedded in frames of experience...

...Out of this he constructs a great shining myth unlike the Europe any European is likely to know, though there are points, as in the magnificant passage on Paestum (and, I agree with Rexroth that this is the most moving site in Europe) when myth and reality coincide: Paestum, of the twice-blooming Roses, the sea god's honey-Colored stone against The folly of the long decline Of Man...

...It is fascinating to read the two volumes together...

...It underscores the last lines of "The Dragon and the Unicorn," which act as both coda and summation...

...Rexroth's Americanism is balanced, in a poetry that is largely a dialectic moving toward equilibrium, by the vision of an awareness that transcends the local, the particular and the purposive...

...The poet's wife sleeps while he remains awake considering the condition of the world, the nature of man's history, and the great conflict of Atomization versus Autonomy...

...It is a curiosity of literary history that may never be fully revealed, but it colored his view of a whole country...

...in describing the present and evoking the past, he comes in the end to the thought which the whole poem has been hunting, securely trapped in a mesh of imagery...

...I am Back home...

...and one American tradition, the libertarian—his lifelong faith —inspires the view of man in society that recurs constantly in his writing: The State is the organization Of the evil instincts of mankind...

...And he is stating, not too obliquely, one of the essential features of his character as a poet: He is, par excellence, an American poet—almost the American poet of our day...

...How did the London Anarchist Group—a priggish lot I grant?snub Rexroth on this occasion...

...Many of the finest of the shorter poems appear again embedded in the longer, so that one is able to understand the context in which they were created as well as the parallelisms of development...

...Rexroth nevertheless obstinately remains an American phenomenon, tied to his land not merely by the unconsciously accepted influences that give all our minds and sensibilities shapes bound by space and time, but also by some quite deliberate choices...

...Poetry presents generalities, History merely particulars...