Kenneth Rexroth

Kenneth Rexroth (born December 22, 1905, South Bend, Indiana, U.S.—died June 6, 1982, Santa Barbara, California) was an American poet, painter, essayist, and translator. An early champion of the Beat movement, he was a significant figure in 20th-century American poetry. His wide-ranging interests corresponded with the variety of influences that shaped contemporary American bohemianism and literature. After Rexroth’s death, his friend, the novelist Thomas Sanchez, memorialized him as a “longtime iconoclast, onetime radical, Roman Catholic, Communist fellow traveler, jazz scholar, IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] anarchist, translator, philosopher, playwright, librettist, orientalist, critical essayist, radio personality, newspaper columnist, painter, poet and longtime Buddhist.” Rexroth is the author of Encyclopædia Britannica’s article on literature.

Early years and political and bohemian activities

Born to Charles Rexroth and Delia Reed Rexroth in South Bend, Indiana, Kenneth Rexroth was orphaned by age 14 and subsequently went to live with his aunt in Chicago. Although he took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago, he was largely self-educated. Rexroth spent much of his youth traveling in the western United States (as well as Mexico and Europe), hitchhiking, working odd jobs, and organizing and speaking for unions.

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Poetry: First Lines

In 1927 Rexroth settled in San Francisco with his first wife, the painter Andrée Dutcher Schafer. He began publishing poems in small magazines; his early poetry was experimental, influenced by Surrealism. Rexroth developed an interest in Eastern mysticism, and he became more involved in radical politics. That involvement included affiliations with communist organizations, although over the years Rexroth would give different accounts of whether he had been a member of the Communist Party. At one point he claimed he was denied membership because of his anarchist views. On another occasion he said he had joined the party only to withdraw three years later because of “disagreements on moral and physical grounds” about the party’s objectives. (As far as the Federal Bureau of Investigation was concerned, however, Rexroth was a card-carrying member.) Rexroth’s first poetry collection, In What Hour, was published in 1940, and many of its pieces relay his political beliefs at the time, as well as his growing ecological consciousness.

During World War II Rexroth was a conscientious objector who aided Japanese Americans in escaping the U.S. government’s internment camps on the West Coast. His 1944 collection, The Phoenix and the Tortoise, features poems that convey his commitment to pacifism and his knowledge of world religions and philosophy, including Eastern traditions.

The San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, and the “Howl” poetry reading

During the 1940s and ’50s Rexroth was pivotal in the development of the San Francisco poetry renaissance, a loose alliance of poets and artists whose circle would eventually include Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka (then going by the name LeRoi Jones), Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure, and Jack Kerouac. With fellow poets Robert Duncan, Madeline Gleason, and Dylan Thomas, he lent support to the foundation (by Ruth Witt-Diamant in 1954) of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University). In 1953 Rexroth began a 15-year stint as a contributor to The Nation.

On October 7, 1955, Rexroth hosted a consequential event in American literature. That night, at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, he hosted a poetry reading that featured Ginsberg’s first public performance of his poem “Howl,” a profane and profound clarion call for the 1960s counterculture to come. Rexroth’s involvement with the Beats was not peripheral. Two years after the “Howl” reading, he published “San Francisco’s Mature Bohemians,” an article in The Nation that defended the younger generation of poets. Kerouac included a character based on him—an anarchist leader—in his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums. But Rexroth came to resent being dubbed “the Godfather of the Beats,” particularly as the movement (as he saw it) degenerated into excesses and a lack of artistic focus.

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(Read Britannica’s essay on “The ‘Howl’ Heard Round the World.”)

His own poetry during this era includes The Signature of All Things: Poems, Songs, Elegies, Translations, and Epigrams (1950), The Dragon and the Unicorn (1952; the first of several of Rexroth’s works to be a finalist for a National Book Award), and In Defense of the Earth (1956), another entry reflecting Rexroth’s embrace of environmentalism.

Work as a translator

A vociferous reader of world literatures and a prolific translator of Japanese, Chinese, Greek, Latin, and Spanish poetry, Rexroth is often credited with having introduced East Asian poetry to many American readers through his translations in One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1955) and One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (1971). In Beyond the Mountains (1951) he offered four verse plays that drew from Greek tragedy and Japanese Noh drama. In the 1970s Rexroth coedited The Orchid Boat: Women Poets of China (1972) and The Burning Heart: Women Poets of Japan (1977). Spiritually, he practiced Buddhism, Taoism, and yoga. To celebrate his 60th birthday, Rexroth published The Heart’s Garden, the Garden’s Heart (1967), a long meditative poem that was written during his travels in Japan.

Later writings and other projects

Rexroth’s later work was praised for its tight form and its wit and humanistic passion. His Complete Collected Longer Poems appeared in 1962 and Complete Collected Shorter Poems in 1966. New Poems was published in 1974. As a painter, he exhibited his work in such cities as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. From 1968 to 1974 he taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Rexroth also wrote reviews for The New York Times and several San Francisco publications (although a 1967 article for Playboy that was critical of the police got him fired from a gig writing for the San Francisco Examiner). A collection of pieces for his “Classics Revisited” column in The Saturday Review was published in 1968. His essays include Bird in the Bush (1959), Assays (1962), The Alternative Society (1970), With Eye and Ear (1970), and American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (1971). An Autobiographical Novel was published in 1966. Shortly before his death from heart disease in 1982, Rexroth converted to Roman Catholicism.

Personal life and honors

Rexroth and his first wife, Andrée, eventually separated. After her death in 1940, he married Marie Kass, a nurse. They divorced in 1948, and the next year he married fellow poet and writer Marthe Larsen, with whom he had two daughters, Mary (later Mariana) and Katherine. Larsen and Rexroth divorced in 1961. Rexroth was married a fourth time, to poet and painter Carol Tinker, in 1974.

Among the honors that Rexroth received were the Copernicus Award for lifetime achievement and contribution to poetry from the Academy of American Poets in 1975 and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1977.