The Selected Poems of Kenneth Rexroth

By Kenneth Rexroth

Book Overview

He is also one of the most sophisticated. Like William Carlos Williams, he honed his writing to a controlled and direct language. His intellectual complexity matches Wallace Stevens, his polymath erudition Ezra Pound. He is first among our nature poets. His love poems and erotic lyrics are unsurpassed. Rexroth's Selected Poems brings together in a single volume a representative sampling of sixty years' work. Here are substantial passages from his longer poems: The Homestead Called Damascus(1920-1925), begun while the poet was in his teens; the cubist Prolegomenon to a Theodicy (1925-1927); the philosophical masterpiece The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1940-1944) and The Dragon and the Unicorn (1944-1950); and the meditative The Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart (1967). The shorter poems were originally gathered in In What Hour (1940), The Art of Wordly Wisdom (1949), The Signature of All Things (1950), In Defense of the Earth (1956), Natural Numbers(1964), New Poems (1974), and The Morning Star (1979).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811209172
• ISBN13: 9780811209175
• Release Date: November 1984
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Rexroth, A great Teacher in San Francisco

I am amazed whe I go into a bookstore in San Francisco and find that they don't carry any of Kenneth Rexroth' many books. For many of us that lived in San Francisco during his life he was the teacher. Very few creative artists have been as generous in praising other artists. His poetry has it's own flavor. Particularly touching are the series written over many years about his first wife Andree. Go to the library!read him!