Kenneth Rexroth

’s Life Essay, Research Paper

Caren Irr

Rexroth, Kenneth

(22 Dec. 1905- 6 June 1982), poet and translator, was born Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth

in South Bend, Indiana, the son of Charles Rexroth, a pharmaceuticals salesman, and Delia

Reed. Owing to Charles’s rocky career, the family moved frequently throughout the northern

midwest until Delia died in 1916 and Charles in 1919. For the next three years, Rexroth

lived with an aunt in Chicago. After his expulsion from high school, he educated himself

in literary salons, nightclubs, lecture halls, and hobo camps while working as a wrestler,

soda jerk, clerk, and reporter. In 1923-1924 he served a prison term for partial ownership

of a brothel.

During the 1920s, Rexroth backpacked across the country several times, visited Paris

and New York, taught in a religious school, and spent two months in a Hudson Valley

monastery. Reflections on these experiences appear in his later poetry, but his early work

was cubist and surrealist–often opaquely so. In 1927 he married Andr?e Schafer, an

epileptic painter, and they moved to San Francisco. In the late 1920s Rexroth’s first

poems appeared in Pagany, Morada, and Charles Henri Ford’s Blues. He

read much of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy around this time.

During the 1930s, Rexroth studied mysticism and Communism. Readings of Jacob Boehme,

St. Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus influenced revisions to his long poem, Homestead

Called Damascus, published by New Directions in 1963. He also participated in the

Communist party’s John Reed Clubs, organizations supporting working-class writers and

artists. Although skeptical about internal party politics, Rexroth helped organize clubs

on the West Coast until 1938. He corresponded with other leftist poets, such as Louis

Zukofsky and George Oppen, who wanted to save poetry from sentimentality and

impressionism. In the mid-1930s, Rexroth participated in the Federal Arts Projects. In

1936 he spoke at the Western Writers Conference and was published in New Masses, Partisan

Review, New Republic, and Art Front. A long-standing association began

in 1937 when Rexroth’s poetry appeared in the second volume of James Laughlin’s New

Directions in Poetry and Prose. Rexroth would be a lifelong friend, guru, and skiing

companion to this influential publisher.

In 1938 Rexroth shifted his political attention to an ecologically based pacifism. His

first volume of poetry, In What Hour (1940), was tepidly received–a response he

blamed on the literary establishment of the urban East Coast. After Andr?e died in 1940,

he married Marie Kass, a public health nurse who shared his passions for politics and

camping. When the United States entered World War II, Rexroth registered as a

conscientious objector and served as a psychiatric orderly. Objecting to war measures, he

helped a number of Japanese Americans evade internment. During this period, he practiced

Buddhism, Taoism, and yoga.

In 1944 his collection The Phoenix and the Tortoise appeared. The title poem is

a long philosophical narrative interspersed with concrete sensual images. This kind of

earthy Jeremiad was central to Rexroth’s postwar aesthetic. He took the social role of the

poet quite seriously, writing in a 1958 review of Kenneth Patchen’s work, "If no one

cried, ‘Woe, woe to the bloody city of damnation!’ and nobody listened to the few who cry

out, we would know that the human race had finally gone hopelessly and forever mad" (Kenneth

Patchen: A Collection of Essays, ed. Richard G. Morgan [1977], p. 23). In the late

1940s Rexroth established a Friday-evening salon and a Wednesday-night philosophy club to

discuss his theories of politics and poetry; in attendance were friends such as Robert

Duncan, William Everson, Richard Eberhart, Philip Lamantia and, later, Allen Ginsberg,

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and other Beats.

After receiving a Guggenheim fellowship in 1948, Rexroth traveled across Europe and the

United States, making sociological observations that resurfaced in The Dragon and the

Unicorn (1952). During the 1950s Rexroth continued to serve as father figure to the

Beats, partly through a weekly radio show. He also became the biological father of two

daughters; their mother was philosophy student Marthe Larsen. In 1953 he wrote what is

probably his most well-known poem, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," in honor of Dylan

Thomas. A passionate indictment of standardized culture, the poem asks who is responsible

for Thomas’s death; its answer implicates the cocktails and Brooks Brothers suits of this

world. This piece became a standard in Rexroth’s repertoire when, with the Beats, he began

to read poetry with musical accompaniment. Actress Shirley MacLaine attended a

poetry-and-jazz performance in the late 1950s and concluded that Rexroth resembled

"John Donne in the fourth dimension."

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