The alternative society : essays from the other world.

Kenneth Rexroth

Herder and Herder

The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth

Literature & Fiction

Literary

New Directions Paperbook, 1966

Beyond the Mountains

History & Criticism

New Directions Publishing Corporation

Selected poems

Bradford Morrow

Poetry

New Directions

The late Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) is surely one of the most readable of this century's great American poets. 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).

The Selected Poems of Kenneth Rexroth

Classics Revisited

An introduction to the world's great literature is presented in sixty critical essays, each of which discusses the theme, summarizes the plot and explores the work's implications.

Poet, translator, essayist, and voracious reader––Kenneth Rexroth was an omnivore in the fields of literature. The brief, radiant essays of Classics Revisited discuss sixty key books that are, for Rexroth, “basic documents in the history of the imagination.” Ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Huckleberry Finn, these pieces (each about five pages long) originally appeared in the Saturday Review. Distinguished by Rexroth’s plain, wide-awake style, Classics Revisited presents complex ideas in simple language, energized by the author’s air of talking eye-to-eye with his reader. Elastic, at home in several languages, Rexroth is not bound by East or West; he leaps nimbly from Homer to The Mahabharata, from Lady Murasaki to Stendhal. It is only when we pause for breath that we notice his special affinities: for Casanova, lzaak Walton, Macbeth, Icelandic sagas, classical Japanese poetry. He has read everything. In Sterne, he sees traces of the Buddha; in Fielding, hints of Confucius. “Life may not be optimistic,” Rexroth maintains in his introduction, “but it certainly is comic, and the greatest literature presents man wearing the two conventional masks; the grinning and the weeping faces that decorate theatre prosceniums. What is the face behind the mask? Just a human face––yours or mine. That is the irony of it all––the irony that distinguishes great literature––it is all so ordinary.”

Rexroth, More Classics Revisited. the second volume of Rexroth's Classics essays.

More Classics Revisited (A Revived modern classic)

An Autobiographical Novel

Biographies & Memoirs

Whittet Books Ltd

Ploughshares (Vol. 2, No. 3) Spring 1975 - Special Poetry & Poetics Issue

Mark Strand

RAYMOND CARVER

OCTAVIO PAZ

Charles Simic

Robert Pinsky

Alice Mattison

Richard Wilbur

Eamon Grennan

Ploughshares, A Literary Journal

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Books by Kenneth Rexroth