Avocations: On Poetry and Poets

The Poetry of Kenneth Rexroth

The Poetry of Kenneth Rexroth Introduction to Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth “We have preferred the power that apes greatness—Alexander first of all, and then the Roman conquerors, whom our school history books, in an incomparable vulgarity of soul, teach us to admire. We have conquered in our turn . . . our reason has swept everything away. Alone at last, we build our empire upon a desert. How then could we conceive that higher balance in which nature balanced history, beauty, and goodness, and which brought the music of numbers even into the tragedy of blood? We turn our back on nature, we are ashamed of beauty. Our miserable tragedies have the smell of an office, and their blood is the color of dirty ink.” —Albert Camus The year was 1948. Camus’s relationships with Andre Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre had begun to feel the strain that would eventually lead him to disavow all ties with the existentialists. In North America, the official policies of the Cold War were under way. Senator Joseph McCarthy had recruited young politicos like Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon to help him “purge the United States Government of communist infiltrators.” School children were drilled in preparation for “atom bombs.” And American poetry was divided between the conservative New Critics for whom T. S. Eliot was a standard bearer and those who followed William Carlos Williams’s insistence upon “American idiom” and measure for poetry. The Bollingen Prize Committee meeting in 1948 included Eliot himself as well as elements from both camps (Conrad Aiken, W. H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, Karl Shapiro, and Léonie Adams) and was timed to coincide with Eliot’s visit to the United States that fall. When they awarded the prize to Ezra Pound for his Pisan Cantos, a furor ensued. Pound was locked up in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the insane, charged (but untried) with treason for his infamous radio broadcasts from Rome during World War II, writing his great poem and translating Confucius. The “runner-up” was Paterson (Book Two) by Williams. It had been the stated ambition of Pound and Williams to “break 130 Avocations the back of the iamb,” to liberate American poetry. Williams admired some of Eliot’s poetry but despised his influence. In San Francisco, the forty-three-year-old Kenneth Rexroth must have watched with interest. He had connections with many of those involved. Reading Ezra Pound’s Cathay, translations from the eighth century poet Li Po, had first opened Rexroth’s eyes to Chinese poetry while he was still a teenager. It was a huge awakening. In the early thirties, he corresponded with Pound, who provided insights into French and Chinese poetry especially, and who introduced him to James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions and Rexroth’s lifelong friend and patron. The Pound/Rexroth letters conclude in political hostility and mutual animosity. Rexroth was then involved with the Wobblies and many left wing causes and despised “Pound’s virulent, anti-Semitic doggerel.” Pound was immersed in the economic theories of Major Douglas and Social Credit, and actively supported Mussolini. When Rexroth objected to including an Ezra Pound rant in An “Objectivists” Anthology, Pound responded that he would have nothing to do with the project if “dot Chew Bolschevick Rexwrothsky” was included. Also in the thirties, Rexroth explored cubist art and poetry, eventually resolving his own differences with Tristan Tzara and Breton in a “cubist” poem, “Fundamental Disagreement with Two Contemporaries,” (The Art of Worldly Wisdom, 1949). The exact nature of their disagreement remains for speculation. His experiments with cubist poetry were short-lived, although he would say years later that he gave them up only because so few people understood what he was doing. He returned to the spare style he had been evolving since his first poems. Politically, he was a pacifist, like Lowell, William Stafford, and several other poets of the time. But Rexroth has been an almost solitary voice for pacificism throughout all the world’s violence since World War I. Before the end of World War II, he wrote in his note to The Phoenix And the Tortoise, “If the shorter poems might well be dedicated to [D.H.] Lawrence, ‘The Phoenix And the Tortoise’ might well be dedicated to Albert Schweitzer, the man who in our time pre-eminently has realized the dream of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo died impotent and broken, all his projects half done. He proved that the human will is...