One of the crucial links between the Beat poets and the other avant-garde movements of the 1950s was Kenneth Rexroth. He served more or less as liaison between the younger generation and modernists like William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. A political activist for most of his life, he championed curiosity in scholarship and experimentalism in the arts and acted as a kind of pater familias for many poets of the '50s. One of his early disciples, Robert Duncan, found in Rexroth a learned poet able to converse as easily about Oriental philosophy or anarchism as about modernist art or jazz, and he admired him for supporting the idea of poetry unconfined to national borders of poetic schools.

Though clearly a citizen of the world, keenly attentive to international trends, Rexroth was primarily a spokesman for a special kind of American sensibility that unites relentless self-scrutiny with observation of forces at work in the immediate reality of the external world. In retrospect his poetry may be viewed along with that of Charles Olsen and Williams as one of the inescapable forces in American poetry written since World War II. From his moment to ours, American poets are either following the trail he blazed or operating as a counter-movement to his practice or implicit poetics. Speaking recently at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Gary Snyder said as much in an overdue acknowledgement of Rexroth's significant and enduring presence on the American literary scene.

His career is marked by seemingly contradictory currents to which he himself contributed. He wrote nature poetry about the American West, commented on popular culture for the media, and devoted himself to translations from a variety of languages, at the same time eking out a marginal existence by working at odd jobs which afforded him a chance at a literary career (at times he was unemployed: then his second wife, Marie, supported them while he performed domestic duties). The psychic conflicts that must have been aroused by these contradictions might have silenced a lesser spirit or led him to the brink. Rexroth drew on some deep unifying force within himself, gathered these diverse energies together into a coherent entity, and never ceased to praise the primacy of the single self in the act of achieving almost total integration and autonomy, of becoming its own cosmos. He resisted the demands of the rival selves (unlike Eliot and Pound, who submitted their daemon to the claims of other cultures). Though he never lost his faith, he remained too sceptical toward the rigidities of religious profession and fought the pull of nature to become a pantheist as Robinson Jeffers had. Once his own psyche was forged to his own satisfaction, he always sought to give his readers back to themselves, rather than them to him. In willing them to be free, he most recalls the urgings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Indeed, more than any other poet of our age, it was Rexroth who enhanced the Emersonian tradition at a time when allegiance to external authority seemed to be dangerously ascendant. His poetry and criticism embody one of Emerson's central ideals: "In all my lectures," he wrote in his Journals, "I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man." One might say the same of Rexroth. He never shunted responsibility for the world's failure away from individuals. Instead he stood resolutely by his dialectic of love, death, and growth, the strenuous cycle through which a mortal might transcend his own and the world's limitations. That dialectic, unspoken as doctrine but inescapable in the poems, is crucial to understanding Rexroth. Implicit in its operation are the forces that unify his apparently antipodal selves.

Thus, if there is a single overriding truth that emerges from Rexroth's work, it is his conviction that all genuine subjectivity is a high but difficult achievement while supposed objectivity is merely the failure of having become an amalgam of other selves and opinions. Yet he does not deny the stiffening power of the distanced view. There is something peculiarly Emersonian in the way Rexroth, in both his poetry and his prose, continually records the influx of insights that give his work their individualistic flavor, then retreats into an almost studied scepticism. Like Emerson, he is a man armed with a vision of another, perhaps clearer reality which he feels compelled to verify in the pragmatic world.

This feeling for the ideal is in the native tradition. American writers have always claimed knowledge of a "republic of the spirit," a revivified Eden, which permitted them to realize the limitations but also the immanent holiness of the natural world, and to celebrate both simultaneously. Rexroth's poetry would grow out of the tensions and similarities between the world of his visions and the world of reality, and the myth which as a poet he would create out of this conflict. A Homestead Called Damascus, which he began writing at the age of fifteen, reveals to the alert reader how these forces were working their way into his poetry. Furthermore, early in his career, he shows a range of interests Emersonian in scope. The 19th century Unitarians, led by Emerson, broke away from puritanism with romantic and revolutionary gusto and explored the world as their predecessors never had. That freedom—which Emerson called "heroic"—was made available to Rexroth and others who embraced Emerson's openness of spirit. It would soon become evident that Rexroth's true subject was a free human response to whatever swam into his ken. Much of his best poetry can be taken as meditations on the broad range of human engagements—reactions observed in himself or others, stories heard or read, and the responses of his imagination, in dream, in fantasy, in vision. Ultimately he learned to embrace them as one, to fuse them and to write about this collective experience—which is to say, the myths of his time and place. Thus Rexroth often will appear to fluctuate between a possible transfiguration, an Edenic assumption, and a watchful worldliness—but will always be sensitive to the danger of believing that either passion or sophistication alone can bring one to the state of wisdom. In a letter to Louis Zukovsky in 1931, Rexroth comments that "Emerson was one of our greatest poets and one of our best philosophers, but he kept the two activities separate." What Rexroth acquired in the following years was the gift of unifying the two, so that his finest poems unfold as lyric meditative journeys of a man confronting the world imaginatively and immediately, unbound by hoops of sterile tradition.

Rexroth's first thirty years suggest an unrelenting struggle to extract the precious ore from the flux of his hard mid-Western experience. He was bent on overcoming its limitations without wholly repudiating it. Like D. H. Lawrence, whom he would later use and discard, Rexroth was forever forging himself in a kind of inner Faustian drama of which he was, naturally, the hero (the wit who remarked that Rexroth's supreme fiction was Rexroth himself, was not far off the mark). Early in childhood he learned a vital lesson from his mother, Delia Rexroth. She made the world of books available to him, with the most American of admonitions: that which you get from another is never truly instructional, but always stimulation. You taught yourself. Having learned this lesson young from a mother who had Amerindian blood and abolitionist views, Rexroth would later on proclaim as a principle the conviction that great poets call us forth to ourselves, rather than to the causes that we may yearn to serve. Rexroth's mother taught him how to interpret the world according to the principle that there is no method for doing so except through oneself, even though her own temperament would eventually restore her (as his would him) to the lap of the authoritarian Catholic Church. Despite her religious bent, Delia Rexroth apparently never encouraged her precocious son to flee from his individuality. On the contrary, she seems to have urged him to value it above all else, even in its eccentric manifestations.

During these early years, his formal education took place in the bleak classrooms of Elkhart, Toledo, and Battle Creek public schools, while his real education was conducted in the special study his mother had built for him as a counterweight to the platitudes that children were forced to endure in the elementary schools of the day. Against the unimaginative conservatism of the American school system, she pitted her own definition of a proper education, which called upon the mind and spirit to judge conventional wisdom with Emerson's "iron string" of the liberated mind (which W. H. Auden calls "the free man's worship") as a guiding principle.

So it would appear that already there were implanted in young Rexroth the seeds of the dialectic quality which perhaps flourishes best on American soil: that gift, the willingness to quarrel with one self rather than to assert dogmatically, would on one hand challenge the young radical poets who mobilized in San Francisco during the 1950s and on the other would be misappropriated by reactionaries who idealized individualism for its own ends. Indeed, it is ironic that Rexroth's vision of humanity, though couched in the call for a small community of the spirit, should have taken shape as an elitist vision, if elite in the best sense of the word. That too was real and came from his mother's constant reminder that the Rexroth clan was special, different from the lumpen proletariat of the small Midwestern cities where Rexroth grew up.

Confronted with the fluctuating fortunes of an alcoholic father forced to become a travelling salesman of drugs, living the life of what George Bernard Shaw called "downstarts," the youthful Rexroth clung to the image of individualism as his most precious heritage, and more importantly, as his only hope for an imaginative life amid impoverished circumstances. Based on what appears to have been his mother's faith in the Emersonian ideal, there developed in him the belief that the only literary and critical method worth embracing was the investigation of the self. Though he continued to work at a variety of odd jobs and enlisted in the ranks of radical organizations that required total fealty, he remained wary of any occupation or cause which might stamp him inwardly with its insignia. He ingested huge chunks of the past in history, philosophy, and the classics, ransacking the public libraries of Elkhart, Toledo, and later Chicago, where the museums also provided him with a self-education in art and painting which the public schools could not equal. He seems to have steeped himself in the scholastics, especially Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, who preached among other things the doctrine of individual conscience, and the mystical idealist Jakob Boehme, who sent him into ecstasies. He delighted in consuming without discretion almost anything that fed his appetite for intellectual stimulation, that exercised the inner Self he had learned to prize as his most precious possession. He was already developing the ability to absorb diverse materials from many cultures, yet not leave his own center. For the youthful Rexroth, already rooted in his immediate reality, the past was neither a prescription nor a burden; it was rather an aesthetic experience. He used the past to enhance the present and to catapult himself into the future, using his sense of himself as his gyroscope. While he welcomed the warming wisdom of the past, he was careful to shear away from its authority. Even his early poetry reflected a mind dominated by a powerful sense of individualism, mellowed by the slanting sun of old European culture but not profoundly modified by it or made discontent with its own landscape. And perhaps reading through Emerson, he concurred with the old sage that engagement with the present moment in a particular place provided the gunpowder of the mind. At the same time, it became increasingly clear to him that a writer could not maintain a literary career like Emerson's without immense commitment to studying and reading (later on, as an unconscious tribute to this obsession of his, one San Francisco writer would complain, "Rexroth wants us to read everything"). The apprentice, Rexroth concluded, had to submit to a monastic mode of life, either in or out of a monastery.

After travelling extensively in the West, sometime around 1928 Rexroth came to New York for a second time and rented a basement apartment on Grove Street, in the same building where Allen Tate and Hart Crane, "that tragic enragé," were living. The Jazz Age was then in full swing. Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker were the toasts of the Algonquin parties. Weekend parties at the Boosevain home in Jamaica Estates were presided over by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Rexroth flirted with the fringes of this scene (alluded to in Homestead), but he had neither the means nor the notoriety to participate except as an observer in that fast-paced life. Moreover, he disliked the unavoidable aspects of New York City life—the dirt, the noise, the tension, and he was soon considering alternatives. He started attending church at St. Luke's, a pre-Revolutionary church run by Peter Schlueter, "one of the most remarkable men in the history of Anglo-Catholicism in America." About mid-February of that year, Rexroth was baptized into the church and left Sin City in a snow-storm for the Holy Cross Monastery across the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie, ready to give up the world for a religious vocation—or at least a monastic one. There is no way to be sure how long he actually stayed, since his own accounts vary and the Monastery of the Holy Cross retained no record of his attendance. If we examine the events of his previous years, (described in An Autobiographical Novel), we get some understanding of how the vagaries of a difficult and relatively rootless, survival-type of boyhood could have driven him toward the security of that peaceful patch of ground overlooking the Hudson River and its verdant valley. He apparently hoped, in the presence of like-spirited sympathetic souls, to recover the meaning of theodicy in an age of faithlessness and agnosticism, to fire anew the idea of God in his own heart. From Boehme he had learned that God was equal to mind, the vital mind which is a form of imaginative, intellectual, and moral action that Emerson had tried to embody and to recommend as a counter to the ills of his age. Emerson had demanded that we reconsider and re-examine the value and trustworthiness of all received knowledge and of the intellectual habits that load our faith in that knowledge, and now Rexroth was facing a similar dilemma of doubt and belief, described in surrealistic detail in A Homestead Called Damascus. The late Robert Fitzgerald puts it very well, as if he were talking about Rexroth: "So hard at best is the lot of man, and so great is the beauty he can apprehend, that only a religious conception of things can take in the extremes and meet the case. But it seems to me there are a few things everyone can humbly try to hold onto: love and mercy (and humor) in everyday living; the quest for the exact truth in language and affairs of the intellect, self-recollection or prayer; and the peace, the composed energy of art."

It worked for a time, apparently, but the straining for freedom of action apparently overwhelmed all other impulses. Furthermore, Rexroth's craving for intellectual experience and literary associations could not be satisfied through the limited resources of the monastery (though he seems to have made good use of a lively library on the premises). After about two months of religious experience, he discovered that he was not a natural-born monk and that his temperament was better suited to a kinetic active life than to a contemplative one. He returned to New York long enough to ship out for Europe as a mess-steward aboard a rusty old freighter. On his return to Chicago, Rexroth met and married a young painter named Andree Shaefer. Together they headed for California and decided to live there. They spent some time on the Monterrey Peninsula in the area of Carmel and around Big Sur, camping, hiking from site to site, and tramping mountain trails. Soon the dramatic setting began to infiltrate his sensibility and perception. Relatively isolated from European influences, his thinking became American in a very special sense. In somewhat the same way as Robinson Jeffers, Rexroth slipped into the spell of the American West, of the California spaces, the mountains, the forests, the wild terrain, and the Pacific Ocean itself. Especially the area around Carmel had a visual splendor almost dreamlike, a "soft-focus mirage of dunes and crashing white water and guano-washed rock islets and sheer cliffs falling into the surf and forest and meadows and clinging mists and windbent stands of cypresses" (Danny Santiago). The place created a pervading, even comforting conviction that no artistic accomplishment could ever match this landscape, arousing in him once more a sense of a sacramental presence in all things. He filled his poems in progress with the stamp of that discovery. In these poems, there is nowhere a trace, not one blurring image of language or perception rooted in other cultures or geographies (though he never seems to have forgotten Apollinaire). The yet unspoiled California land breathes into and through Rexroth—and it is for this quality that William Everson calls him one of the finest nature poets in American literature. However much Rexroth may have contributed to the ferment of American letters later on in his San Francisco days, his discovery of America, in its specific local manifestations, was to be no less important a contribution. Once young writers like Snyder, Whalen, Levertov, Everson, and McClure experienced these poems, the body of America could no longer be the same to them—or to us. Rexroth had learned the significance of place (his reading of Lawrence helped), but at the same time, he never lost sight of the risk of putting place before person—of allowing place, no matter how alluring, to be the designator of personality, to the point that feelings about love, sex, and inner life are excluded. What John Ashbery said about Frank O'Hara's work applies to Rexroth's: "Even at its most abstract, even when it seems to be speaking about something else, it is poetry emerging out of his life." Yet there is little about it that we can call "confessional" in the same breath that might be appropriate for Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, or Allen Ginsberg. Rexroth does not linger over aberrant aspects of himself, nor does he dally much with quirky or bizarre reflections, in the hope that his self-absorption will make them seem exemplary rather than eccentric. He wastes little time analyzing himself or turning his personality inside out. "I have always been too busy being a poet or a painter or a husband or a father or a cook or a mountain climber to worry about my personality," he would boast in his autobiography. If he does talk about himself in his poetry, it is mainly because he cannot avoid himself as the maker of the poem, almost exactly as Emerson confronts himself in his "confessional" essays. In the end, the poem materializes as a natural setting for the ruminations of a man seemingly caught up in the big and little phenomena that make up the unknowable substance of our existence. It is an open poetry, American in its openness, and it has a powerful appeal to those people who, in a phrase of Kenneth Koch, are "dying for the truth."

It was during this period that one of the most important developments in his poetics begins to emerge. Emerson had hoped that for his generation the ancient precept, "Know thyself" and the contemporary precept, "Study nature" (espoused by Thoreau and dismissed by James Russell Lowell as mere sentiment and "one more symptom of the general liver complaint"), would become a single precept, a single piece of advice. Self-knowledge, for Emerson, was inextricably linked to the search for a stable center, an authoritative moment, an expression or mode of action in a centrifugal field. He was intent on schooling himself in endless diffusion and indeterminacy as the context for that search, so that certitude and even rigid consistency would be constantly under query. Only in this way could one know oneself. And the search had to be in the world, the world that looked like an abyss but which Emerson sensed was a constant becoming, a complex and ever-changing arena for courageous human action that discourse was incapable of capturing. Rexroth experimented with ways to blend knowledge of self with knowledge of place (Emerson, of course, was stalking the idea of the integration of sensibility). When Rexroth was successful, the physical observed metaphorically was carried into his inner or invisible world and his poetry acquires a new commanding power that grows out of this union. His poetry was never far from nature and never far from himself. He was in the world and the world was in him as the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea (St. Catherine in Siena). This quality gave his work a rugged honesty, strength, and fragility not common in the poetry of his day.

Aside from the visual splendors it offered, the Carmel area was "an outpost of bohemia, a place of artists, near artists, and would-be artists" (Kevin Starr, in Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915), the perfect setting for anyone bent on merging self-knowledge and nature. But Rexroth may have been drawn to Carmel for other reasons. Carmel had the reputation of being "progressive" (Langston Hughes lived there for years) and Rexroth was no doubt exposed to what Kevin Starr calls Carmel's "loquacious socialism" and "posturing reformism." When he later became politically active in San Francisco, Rexroth shrewdly stripped his own style of socialism of the posturing (whether he succeeded in shedding the loquaciousness as well is a matter of debate). For a while he was a member of the Communist Party, but its demands for conformity with the Party line outraged a conscience that was closer to Emerson's than Stalin's.

The radical movement in politics, originating in the struggle against the power of the railroads and land-owners in the West, swept through the San Francisco area shortly before the Rexroths arrived there. Along with it came the Marxist aesthetic which combined the demand for an American poetry derived from Whitman with the Soviet demand for a revolutionary literature. Fused, these two strains created a body of work that was peculiarly the product of the left-wing poets of the decade, mainly Rexroth and Patchen. It is worth noting that these two poets who were writing from a leftist perspective in the thirties became the beacons for the "beat generation" of the fifties and the sixties. The Rexroth-Patchen heritage was carried forward into the new poetry of social protest associated with Ginsberg and his cohorts. Robert Bly's interest in translating Spanish and South American poets may well come from looking back at the thirties, when Williams and Rexroth were translating Pablo Neruda's political poetry. Baraka, who knew Rexroth, developed his experiments with reading poetry to jazz in night-clubs where the political left gathered for entertainment.

In Rexroth's criticism of the capitalist system, in both his essays and his poetry ("You did, you son-of-a-bitch in your Brooks Brothers suit") often sounds inflexible and even merciless, nevertheless his individualism never alienated him from his nativist roots. In one respect it made him a spokesman for it—he was for a time in San Francisco an extremely popular columnist with unpopular views. The younger poets of the following generation, whose often eccentric individualism did in fact alienate them from their roots, nonetheless tried to take up the Rexroth tradition and at first treasured him for re-introducing the artist in his role as shaman—a mystical, priestly political figure in pre-historic cultures, the figure who stood at the entrance to a spiritually renovated future. It was Rexroth who recognized with incisive clarity the energizing reality of America. For him, America dealt in transformation: it suggested an endless series of possibilities, extending like the reflections of two mirrors set facing one another, stretching on, replica after replica, to the vanishing point. It suggested one adventure after the other, one wondrous day after the other, one improvement after the other. It suggested rejuvenation, the pain of impoverished childhood overcome and transcended, and even endless love once deemed lost. The real promise was immortality. Where other writers of the same intensity had a darkened vision of our customary existence as though seen through a begrimed window, Rexroth's vision remained optimistic and flickered with the light of paradise not yet rendered a vanishing fantasy by events.

Here we may have the key to Rexroth's magnetism for those writers who sought him out on Scott Street. Rexroth returned them to the human economy that Emerson had in mind when he wrote: "The one thing in the world, in value, is the active soul." It may not be an exaggeration to say that Rexroth altered the course of American poetry through his influence on some of the best minds of the following generation who sought to fashion a poetry that could become an instrument for political and social change, that might create an ambience for nourishing his vision.