Overview
Kenneth Rexroth
(1905—1982)
Quick Reference
(1905–82),
Indianaborn 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 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).
