Kenneth Rexroth

Kenneth Rexroth 1905-82, American poet, critic, and translator, b. South Bend, Ind. A resident of San Francisco, he was briefly associated with the beat generation , although he disdained their lack of discipline. Self-educated, he taught himself several languages; his translations include One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1956) and The Orchid Boat: Women Poets of China (with Ling Chung, 1973). He is best known, however, for his own poetry. Modernist in his early life, simple and Zenlike in his later years, his verse is unified by autobiographical content, a mingling of the personal with the political, and a concern with the transience of life and the transcendent joys of nature and eros. His verse collections include In What Hour (1940), The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1944), In Defense of the Earth (1956), and New Poems (1974). He also wrote one volume of verse plays, Beyond the Mountains (1951), and several volumes of essays, including Bird in the Bush (1959), Alternative Society: Essays from the Other World (1970), and Communalism: From Its Origins to the 20th Century (1975).

Bibliography: See S. Hamill and B. Morrow, ed., The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (2003); biography by L. Hamalian (1991); studies by M. Gibson (1972 and 1986), L. Bartlett (1988), K. Knabb (1990), and D. Gutierrez (1996).

Rexroth, Kenneth (1905–82), Indiana‐born poet and critic, resident in San Francisco after 1927, where he was associated in different eras with radical social views, Objectivist poetry, and the Beat movement. His collections of poems include In What Hour (1940), The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1944), The Signature of All Things (1949), In Defence of the Earth (1956), Natural Numbers (1963), Shorter Poems (1966), Longer Poems (1968), and New Poems (1974). He also wrote verse plays; Beyond the Mountains (1951), a verse travel journal; The Dragon and the Unicorn (1952); and many adaptations or translations from the French, Chinese, and Japanese. His essays have appeared in many volumes including Bird in the Bush (1959), Assays (1961), The Alternative Society (1971), With Eye and Ear (1971), and The Elastic Retort (1974). His orphaned youth and experiences to the age of 21 appear in An Autobiographical Novel (1966), and a brief treatment of later years appears in Excerpts from a Life (1981). His anti‐Establishment beliefs are treated in a survey, Communalism (1975), and his dedication to great literature of the past is seen in his Classics Revisited (1969). A gathering of his essays was published posthumously in World Outside the Window (1987).