[In the following essay, Lipton takes a hard look at Rexroth's formal and metrical experimentation.]

In the introduction to his anthology, New British Poets, Kenneth Rexroth observed that "On the eve of the second war, the intellectual world generally was still dominated by the gospel of artistic impersonality, inherited from the nineteenth century 'scientific,' 'exact aesthetic,' and the opposed cult of artistic irresponsibility, 'Art for Art's Sake,' Mallarmé, Valéry, Cubism, much Marxism, the dubious 'Thomism' of M. Maritain, T. S. Eliot, Laura Riding, Robert Graves, I. A. Richards, most surrealists—it was almost universally taught and believed that the work of art was not communicative, was not 'about anything.' Instead, it should be approached empirically, from a utilitarian basis, as an object existing in its own right, a sort of machine for precipitating an 'aesthetic experience.' … I believe that this rigorous rationalism, this suppression of all acknowledgement of personality, feeling, intuition, the denial of communication and of the existence of emotion, is part of the general sickness of the world, the Romantic Agony, the splitting of the modern personality, the attempt to divorce the brain from the rest of the nervous system." This theory dominated European art for half a century, he went on to say, but "there is only one trouble with it, and that is that it isn't true. There is no such work of art. The paintings of Picasso, or even Mondrian, the sculpture of Brancusi, the poetry of Eliot or Valéry, the music of Stravinsky, they are all intensely personal. In fact, they are amongst the most personal works of art in the history of culture."

It is well to bear this passage in mind when one attempts to examine critically the poems of Kenneth Rexroth before 1940. Many of the poems in The Art of Worldly Wisdom and In What Hour explore the problem of form; of the former Rexroth wrote in the preface: "Technically, I suppose most of these poems represent about as an advanced position as American poetry has taken. I can think onlyof the poems of Walter Arensburg, Gertrude Stein, Walter Lowenfels, and Louis Zukofsky to compare with them. Of course, similar French poetry has long been accepted by all literate people. They are not 'difficult' poems in the sense that the Neo-Metaphysical verse of the Reactionary Generation which came after them is difficult. There are no Seven Types of Ambiguity lurking in them. Their elements are as simple as the elementary shapes of a cubist painting and the total poem is as definite and apprehensible as the finished picture." These, the poems in The Art of Worldly Wisdom, were published only a few years ago, but they are, with the exception of The Homestead Called Damascus, his earliest, dating as they do from 1927-1932. "I have withheld them from permanent publication," he explains, "until the time which produced them was no longer an element in the judgment of their value," and he characterizes the period in which they were written as, for him, "a half decade of transition and foreboding."

Once he got over this period, he went right ahead to discover his own idiom in books like The Phoenix and the Tortoise and The Dragon and the Unicorn. He likes to think that there is an unbroken progression from first to last in his poems. "My poetry today, though it employs a more accepted idiom, does not differ fundamentally," from the poems in The Art of Worldly Wisdom, he says in the preface to that book. "These poems are not in quest of hallucination," he adds, as if he were clearing himself before a committee of Objectivists. "They owe nothing to the surrealism which was coming into fashion when they were being written. One poem is a sort of polemic by example against two leaders of surrealism. They are intended to be directly communicative, but communicate by means similar to those employed by the cubists in the plastic arts or by Sergei Eisenstein in his early great films—the analysis of reality into simple units and the synthesis of the work of art as a real parallel to experience." That may be the way he remembers it twenty-five years later, but it is not the way it looked and felt at the time. He tried everything, at least once, even automatic writing and hallucination. I remember it because I tried it too, along with him. We were constantly together during those years. I destroyed all but a few of my poems of that period. He preferred to publish his—twenty-five years later, in book form. They are good poems, of their sort, but they are not "built of and articulated around elements which are as simple, sensuous and passionate as I could find … communicative, even didactic." What is simple, sensuous and passionate about

or

ancre ridgedge et poissoble ongpoint
(or) KAniv ubiskysplice ubi danAe ubi diamondane
thru oat quiv                   at place
at daybreak                   shellbreak

lines which he addressed to Louis Zukofsky, to whom, presumably, they were simple and for all we know sensuous and passionate. The preceding lines were addressed to W. C. Williams. Epistolary verse is one of the favorite forms with coterie poets, and sometimes it is written in code. It's more fun that way.

Let's not be stuffy about it. Surely, after all these years it is silly to pretend that there weren't times when we were kidding ourselves and kidding each other, just for the hell of it. There is a good deal of that in The Art of Worldly Wisdom. I don't mean the piece addressed to Tzara and Breton, that was deliberate parody. I mean the borderline moments when we weren't sure ourselves whether we meant it, or were just playing with words to see how it felt. It was good, it was healthy, it was necessary, but there is no use pretending now that it was anything more than that. Or to pretend afterwards that it was something else which it wasn't. "In prosody, and in certain devices of syntax," says Rexroth of the poems in The Art of Worldly Wisdom, "they owe much to primitive songs—American Indian, Melanesian, Negro, Negrito, Bushman, etc., and to the study of languages least like the IndoEuropean groups—subjects which greatly interested me then and from which I hoped much new blood could be transfused into English poetry. Medieval Latin poetry, especially the great sequences—in particular of Adam of St. Victor and of Abelard—is another metrical influence." Technically as advanced a position as American poetry has taken, owing much to primitive songs, etc. No one blinks an eye, because by now we are all familiar with the radical, "advanced" position of the poet in quest of fresh beginnings in ancient sources. Much nonsense has been written about it, but in Rexroth it was no pretense, no pose. Compare, for instance,

The word became fruitful;
It dwelt with the feeble glimmering;
It brought forth night:
The great night, the long night,
The lowest night, the loftiest night,
The thick night to be felt,
The night to be touched,
The night not to be seen,
The night ending in death.

with

And did you dream
The white the large
The slow movement
The type of dream
The terror
The tumbling stone

…..

In early dawn the plume of smoke
The throat of night
The plethora of wine
The fractured hour of light
The opaque lens
The climbing wheel

The first is from a Maori chant, quoted by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the second from "A Prolegomenon to a Theodicy" in The Art of Worldly Wisdom. Or compare this chant for a taro feeding ceremony among the Manus of the Admiralty Islands, quoted by Margaret Mead in Growing Up in New Guinea:

with

from "When You Ask for It," again in The Art of Worldly Wisdom. And in the same piece the use of Negro folk material—"Star in the east / Star in the west / Wish that star was in my breast," a source that he was to rediscover later in the music of jazz.

But experiment in prosody was never Rexroth's primary interest nor ever held him for very long. In these, the very first of his poems there was already the foundation that he was to build into a framework of ideas. It is all, one way or another, a prolegomenon to a theodicy. "We were interested in ways of being," "The grammar of cause / The cause of grammar / The place of being" (Art of Worldly Wisdom). He was writing a theodicy, a justification of the divine attributes, of justice; not merely to justify a formal, technical credo, whether Zukofsky's or anybody else's, including his own.

In What Hour seems at first glance to be an interruption to the quest for a theodicy, because it has so much topical material in it. Written during the Depression years and first published, some of it, in magazines like New Masses, Partisan Review and The New Republic, it adds up for Rexroth into Lessons in Geography and History. Had We But Time, and The Place of Value in a World of Facts—the titles he gives to the parts into which he divided the book—and ends with "Ice Shall Cover Nineveh," which carries further his inquiry into the problem of good and evil, act and destiny which began with the "Prolegomenon." Formally, technically, it begins to approach the syllabic line ofhis later work, a tendency that becomes even more marked in The Signature of All Things and The Phoenix and the Tortoise. He is at pains to tell us that "sometimes after the poem is cast in syllabic lines it is broken up into cadences," and the influence, "poetic kinship," he prefers to call it, of the Chinese is making itself felt. "Against this (syllabic line) is counterpointed a rhythm primarily of quantity, secondarily of accent. In addition, close attention is paid to the melodic line of the vowels and to the evolution of consonants (p-b-k, m-r-l-y, etc.)· In most cases a melody was written at the same time as the poem."

The poetry of self-exploration, which usually comes early, came late in Rexroth's writing career. It is retrospective in character, as in the title poem of The Signature of All Things,

… The long hours go by.
I think of those who have loved me,
Of all the mountains I have climbed,
Of all the seas I have swum in.
The evil of the world sinks.
My own sin and trouble fall away
Like Christian's bundle, and I watch
My forty summers fall like falling
Leaves and falling water held
Eternally in summer air.

where the frequently varied eight syllable line is the metrical scheme and the metaphor is based mostly on nature—trees, skies, stars, mountains, rivers, seas, rain, snow, sun. Elegies and epistles. Memories of his first wife, Andrée, who died young. Reliving their love in memory, trying to bridge the sense of separation with unmailable letters. "These are all simple, personal poems, as close as I can make them to integral experience." Trying to relate the personal experience to the social experience. "Perhaps the integral person is more revolutionary than any program, party, or social conflict. At least I have come to think so." Trying to convince himself that in abandoning the "social" poem—"Gentlemen, I Address You Publicly" or the "public speech" which in the Thirties had lured even Archibald MacLeish away from a poetry that "should not mean / But be," he was still performing the function of the social poet. "And I have little doubt but that he—the irreducible man—is the great enemy of the fools and rascals who are destroying the world." And arriving at the "religious anarchism" which he would have us believe has been "the point of view … in all my work" from the beginning.

Iambic is the sound barrier of English verse and it is in this period that Rexroth broke the sound barrier. The vehicle he uses is the seven syllable line. Nothing breaks the habit of iambic better than the discipline of practicing to breathe, so to speak, in seven syllable intervals. Or nine syllables. Eight, if you must, but never ten. Well, hardly ever.

Not like strident Sappho, who
For all her grandeur, must have
Had endemetriosis,
But like Anyte, who says
Just enough, softly, for all
The thousands of years to remember.

The temptation here would have been, for a mind trained but not retrained in English verse, to start with a tensyllable five-stress line of iambic—

Not like strident Sappho who for all her
Grandeur must have had….

and take off from there, content to settle for a metrically more manageable word than endemetriosis. Not that the seven syllable line doesn't present the poet with Procrustean problems, any line length is bound to. Rexroth is no word-chopper with a box of hyphens in his tool chest. He prefers to let the line run on into nine syllables, or even eight, and break the rule rather than the word. I do not impute any special virtue to this practice. Others—Cummings, for one—have done wonderful things with hyphens. So has James Boyer May. But Rexroth justifies his practice in the only way any metric can be justified, by making vocally viable verse with it. Perhaps, like William Carlos Williams, he tends to think of iambic as English rather than American prosody. As late as only a few years ago Williams still thought it necessary to emphasize the distinction at a poetry conference on "Experimental and Formal Verse" held at Bard College. "We speak a language that is not English any longer…. It has structural elements in time and pace … which are not that of English…. It is more Mediterranean than North Sea and it is more loose-jointed than English … more dynamic as contrasted with the static nature of English … the prosody of English does not apply to American…. The first thing we must do as poets is to throw it out, body and soul…. To build, if we are men, something better … to invent a prosody of our own."

And no tricks, Rexroth would add. No hooks, no shock, no hypnosis. No verbal massage. Perhaps it was something like this he had in mind when he used the words "simple, sensuous and passionate."

Where a longer, more reflective line seems to be called for, he has settled for the sevento nine-syllable line, as in The Phoenix and the Tortoise and The Dragon and the Unicorn. Speaking of the latter, in his preface, Rexroth says that since he feels "that the poet is most important socially and artistically when he speaks in his vatic role" and "the first duty of the poet is to communicate … there is nothing unconventional about this poem. What technical subtleties it possesses are discreetly veiled under a simple syllabic prosody." Here the line is more often one of seven or eight rather than nine syllables. The reviewers who called it "percussive" and "metronomic"—when they didn't call it "chopped up prose"—were probably giving it the old finger-counting test rather than the oral reading it requires. (How many reviewers give any book of poems an oral reading before sounding off in print about it? The commercial laboratory equivalent of such practice is the "sink test.") Despite the fact that Rexroth keeps repeating that his meter is based on quantity, it is not to be read like Latin or Greek verse. Lines like

French radical youth, like
The Wandervôgel before them,
Have a better way of marking
Time until the monsters destroy
Each other: Keep uncompromised;
Stay poor; try to keep out from

Under the boot; love one another;
Reject all illusions; wait.

can be read aloud only one way: as casual speech. What distinguishes stuff like this from prose is its concentration and tension. Moreover, it is a highly flexible idiom. It can pass from the philosophical—

It is true that being is
Responsibility, beyond
The speculations of Calvin,
St. Thomas, or Augustine,
Ontology is ethical.

to the narrative—

We fill our rucksacks at a
Rôtisserie just like the ones
In Pompeii, with bread just like the
Pumice casts, and take the train
To the South….

to passionate anger—

without missing a beat. Could it not, then, be set up just as well like poetic prose? It could, without losing its sense or its tone, but it would lose the pace which the poet wishes to give his words. After all, that is what line-length is for: a formal notation of the poet's tempo, the pace and emphasis he prescribes for the oral rendition of the verse. There is more opportunity here for alternating legato with staccato passages than the longer, flowing line of poetic prose permits. Read the lines aloud, pausing at the line-ends no more and no less than a good actor pauses at the line-ends of Shakespeare's iambic pentameter lines, and the ear will recognize the logic of the weight and measure Rexroth has given them. Not always, of course, for all formal arrangements of sound entail some compromise with sense at times. The trick is to know when to compromise, and, when compromise is not advisable, which to favor, which is more vital to the total effect of the passage.

In the verse plays, Beyond the Mountains, Rexroth was faced once more with the problem of form. He calls them Noh plays on classical themes and says that he hoped to find in them "a more direct expression than philosophical elegy affords." "I have found it interesting," he says in the Introduction, "to subject my philosophical opinions to the test of dramatic speech." How well his philosophy stands the test of drama is not our concern here. The seven-syllable line stands up well in dialogue. This should not surprise anyone. I am sure it did not surprise him. It is used flexibly, of course, as in the other books, alternating at times with shorter and longer lines, but nearly always stopping short of ten syllables, and rarely falling into iambic. Why this studied avoidance of iambic?

The answer to this question is the clue to what is central and pivotal, I think, in Rexroth's work, and I shall make it my final one. Nothing in art is natural. Art is by definition artificial. Cadenced speech, even grammar and syntax, and when it comes to that, language itself is an artifact. Every actor on the stage, even in the most naturalistic theater, is bigger than life size. When he speaks verse he is ten feet high. He is a god, and he might as well be wearing a mask, or a goat skin. One verse-dramatist writes me that he is convinced, after years of research, that the line of natural American speech today is a three-beat line. Another assures me it is the four-beat line. All are pretty well agreed—all "moderns," that is—that it is not iambic. Was it ever iambic? Shakespeare's clowns (countrymen and common folk) talk prose, his noblemen talk verse. Not invariably, but often enough to suggest that this was the convention of the stage. But only on the stage. In real life they talked prose, like anybody else. Iambic is no more "basic" to English speech than any other meter. The only thing that is basic to meter is a psycho-motor impulse, but all attempts to classify and correlate meters with specific emotions break down when tested by experience. Anger, for example, even towering rage, can be, and in fact is constantly being, expressed in iambics, trochees or anapests, even in glaring silence. The meter need not be "true to life." It need be true to only one rule: the rule that the poet sets up for his poem. It is justified by the inner consistency of the work of art. There is nothing in all this that Rexroth could not say Yes to, judging by what he himself has said to me personally, or in print. So his avoidance of iambic must be explained in some other way.

Iambic is tied up in the education of every English-writing poet with all the philosophical and metaphysical poets of the past. Especially iambic pentameter. It is the metrical vehicle of the Holy Sonnets, Paradise Lost, of Herbert and Traherne, of Wordsworth's Prelude as well as Pope's Essay on Man, of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound as well as Browning's Sordello. Hardy never quite broke through the sound barrier. "There is always something a little synthetic about Hardy's rugged verse," Rexroth remarks at one point in his Introduction to Lawrence's poems. "The smoother ones seem more natural, somehow," he says, and names Hardy's sonnet to Leslie Stephen as his best poem. The implication here is personal, and Rexroth confirms it as he goes on: "If Hardy ever had a girl in the hay, tipsy on cider, on the night of Boxing Day, he kept quiet about it … he never let on, except indirectly." Hardy was a pandit and iambic meter was his métier, while Lawrence was a Wandervögel and the freer-flying forms came naturally to him. "At the very beginning Lawrence belonged to a different order of being from the literary writers of his day."

Tinkering with the iambic in small ways was something that Rexroth passed up from the start. "Compulsion neurotics like Hopkins and querulous old gentlemen like Bridges made quite an art of metrical eccentricity. You turned an iamb into a trochee here, and an anapest into a hard spondee there, and pretty soon you got something that sounded difficult and tortured and intense." When Rexroth broke with the church-bound, creed-bound tradition of the English philosophical, religious, metaphysical poets, he went all the way and broke with their metrics too. Earlier and more completely than Lawrence did. "In 1912 he [Lawrence] said: Ί worship Christ, I worship Jehovah, I worship Pan, I worship Aphrodite. But I do not worship hands nailed and running with blood upon a cross, nor licentiousness, nor lust. I want them all, all the gods. They are all God. But I must serve in real love. If I take my whole passionate, spiritual and physical love to a woman who in turn loves me, that is how I serve God. And my hymn and my game of joy is my work. All of which I read in….' Do you know what he read all that in?" asks Rexroth. "It makes you wince. He thought he found that in Georgian Poetry, 1911-12! In Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfred Gibson, John Drinkwater, Rupert Brooke, John Masefield, Walter de la Mare, Gordon Bottomley!"

Lawrence thought he was a Georgian, at first, Rexroth reminds us. But he, Rexroth, with that case of mistaken self-identity before him, made no comparable mistake. Nor did he go the way of Eliot, who broke with the metric and returned to the tradition after that first brief revolt; preached the funeral oration over the grave of a dead tradition and then jumped in with the corpse. What Rexroth came to admire in Lawrence's verse was its "uncanny, 'surreal' accuracy of perception and evaluation." And what about Objectivism? "Objectivism is a hollow word beside this complete precision and purposiveness." The surrealistic, then, need not be hallucinatory. "Bad poetry always suffers from the same defect: synthetic hallucination and artifice. Invention is not poetry…. Poetry is vision, the pure act of sensual communion and contemplation." "Good cadenced verse is the most difficult of all to write. Any falsity, any pose, any corruption, any ineptitude, any vulgarity, show up immediately…. The craft is the vision and the vision is the craft." Since the vision is unteachable, the craft too becomes unteachable. And impossible to criticize? Here is a dilemma. In fact, all such reasoning leads to dilemma, and Lawrence is full of such reasoning—or, rather, such intuiting. It is attractive, and contagious. At every turn we are next door to the poet as God. And Gods do not have to learn their craft, they do not even have to think, and they are above criticism either by themselves or by others. It is a heady notion and Rexroth, for all his usual sanity of mind, fell for it while he was reading and "introducing" Lawrence.

One thing does seem fairly certain, however. That all the forms and techniques prove, on close examination, to be timelessly enduring—and forever expendable. A paradox but not a contradiction. "The sonnet or quatrain are like the national debt, devices for postponing the day of reckoning indefinitely. All artistic devices are a method of spiritual deficit-financing." We could ask whether this includes the seven syllable line? I think Rexroth would answer Yes, if only to leave himself free to abandon it when it suits his purpose to do so. The form must change as the vision changes.

When poetry is once more a living art, performing a living social function in society, it will be easier to see, I think, that the content of a poem is the materia poetica of its function, and the form is the performance, in the Latin sense of forma, the shape or likeness of an idea or a thing, the performance of a function. In its completest form it is sutra, the teaching, mantra, the verbal and / or musical sounds of the ritual, and mudra, the symbolic gesture, dance; all three integrated into one. In the verse plays of Beyond the Mountains, Rexroth has attempted that integration. It is premature, but only as all prophecy is premature, and one of the poet's roles is the role of prophet. "Hardy was a major poet. Lawrence was a minor prophet. Like Blake and Yeats, his is the greater tradition."