SOURCE: "The Community of Love: Reading Kenneth Rexroth's Long Poems," in The Centennial Review, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, Winter 1989, pp. 17-31.

[In this excerpt, Bartlett traces the development of the quest theme through all of Rexroth's long poems.]

James Wright has written that Rexroth "is a great love poet during the most loveless of times," and indeed over the past sixty years Rexroth has written some of the most moving and durable American verse of our century. Undoubtedly, Rexroth's most well-known and accessible poems are his lyrics and his translations. Additionally, however, he wrote five long "philosophical" poems; these comprise his 1968 volume, The Collected Longer Poems. The first of these, The Homestead Called Damascus, was written while he was still in his teens; the last, Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart, was not completed until after the collection itself had gone to New Directions. In between we have "A Prolegomenon to a Theodicy," The Phoenix and the Tortoise, and The Dragon and the Unicorn. Interestingly, while criticism of the last decade has found the modern long poem a fruitful area of inquiry (I'm thinking here of fine studies like M. L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall's The Modern Poetic Sequence, Barry Ahern's study of Zukofsky's "A", and countless books and articles on The Cantos, Paterson, The Maximus Poems, Life Studies, and The Dream Songs), Rexroth's long poems have received very little attention. Yet it seems to me that taken together these five poems form as interesting and coherent a major poetic project as any of the other of the great long poems of this century, and certainly if Rexroth's work survives it will be in large measure because of his achievement here. At the very least, his long poem offers an alternative vision and set of stylistic possibilities to what was the prevailing formalist aesthetic.

In his introduction to The Collected Longer Poems, Rexroth explains that he considers these poemsas sections of a larger single project, rather than as discreet entities: "All the sections of this book now seem to me almost as much one long poem as do the The Cantos or Paterson…. The plot remains the same—the interior and exterior adventures of two poles of personality." Further, he notes that "the political stand of the poems never changes: the only Absolute is the Community of Love with which Time ends…. I have tried to embody in verse the belief that the only valid conservation of value lies in the assumption of unlimited liability, the supernatural identification of the self with the tragic unity of the creative process." Though it is doubtful that Rexroth wrote The Homestead Called Damascus, at least, with either Pound's or Williams's notion of a grand modern epic in progress, I would like to look at the poem in some detail because it establishes the twin geometries explored by the poet in his later longer work, and is probably the least well-known of the long poems.

The publication history of Homestead is a little tangled. Rexroth began the poem when he was just fifteen and completed it not later than 1925. Two sections ("Adonis in Summer" and "Adonis in Winter") from Part II appeared as short poems in The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1944), but the poem entire was not published until 1957 in The Quarterly Review of Literature (where it was followed by a series of notes by Lawrence Lipton, and won a Longview Award). New Directions finally released the poem as a separate volume in its "World Poets" pamphlet series in 1963.

Homestead is juvenilia, but (like "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock," completed when Eliot was just twenty-three) it is certainly not slight. "In those days," Rexroth wrote Lawrence Lipton, "we thought The Waste Land a revolutionary poem," and while commentators have seen the influence of both Aiken and Jeffers in Homestead, it is obvious that the poem is Rexroth's youthful attempt to meet Eliot's challenge. Like The Waste Land, Homestead is divided into sections, its intelligibility depends upon both a literate audience and readers willing to work through a rather discontinuous narrative structure, and throughout we sense that no less than the very core of Western Civilization is at stake. Even the language of the poem,

And Thomas, with a narrow light,
comes out and watches, by the gate;
And muses in the turgid night;
And goes into the house again.
The library is calm and prim.
The shepherds and the sheep have passed.
And Botticelli ladies, slim
And hyperthyroid, grace the walls

recalls Eliot's early work. However, while Eliot's allusiveness seems somehow fully integrated into his long poem (can we imagine a Waste Land without it?), Rexroth's often does not. "I was immersed in Frazier, Murray, Harrison, Jessie Weston, A. E. Waite, and was busy reading the whole corpus of the Arthuriad," the poet continued to Lipton, and many times here Rexroth seems to be wearing his learning on his sleeve, as his frequent literary, philosophical, and historical allusions are sometimes merely gratuitous. Still, I think that because of its structural complexity, the loveliness of certain passages, and the fact that the poem announces themes that will play throughout the other, more mature longer poems, Homestead remains an integral part of Rexroth's corpus. Andas the product of a teenage mind, it is remarkable.

The poem is divided into four numbered sections, with the fourth section divided into two parts. Lipton has noted that the "mood" of the work is that of elegiac reverie, though this reverie alternates with straight narrative passages. There are three narrative consciousnesses here—Thomas Damascan, his brother Sebastian, and a disembodied narrative voice who in his comments on the action seems (as Morgan Gibson points out in his Kenneth Rexroth) as dispassionate and omniscient as Eliot's Tiresias—and Rexroth has spoken of these three voice as components of a single personality, his own. Flatly stated, the plot of the poem follows the general pattern of a quest tale. It begins with a twenty-two-line meditation by, presumably, the third narrative voice which contrasts unquestioning angels ("robed / in tublar, neuter folds of pink and blue") with young minds searching for their identities ("poking in odd / Corners for unsampled vocations / Of the spirit, / While the flesh is strong"). Following, we discover that two brothers, Thomas and Sebastian (and the religious implications here are, of course, deliberate), lead rather idyllic lives on the family estate in the Catskills—hiking, reading books like The Golden Bough, and sitting up late "drinking wine, / Playing chess, arguing—Plato and Leibnitz, Einstein, Freud and Marx." This pastoral scene ("The sheep are passing in the snow") alternates with the thoroughly modern ("The dim lit station, the late slow train, / And the city of steel and concrete towers") as the boys contemplate the possibility of love as a stay against mortality. The section ends on a harsh note as Sebastian sets the possibility of happiness with his female neighbor Leslie against a sense of the inevitability of death, while Thomas weighs the memory of "panthers' soft cries" in their mating against "Death / Here hinges fall, a land of crusts and / Rusted keys … Hakeldama, the potters' field / Full of dead strangers."

In Part II, Thomas crosses the mountains for the "empty city from which / Alternate noise and utter stillness come," leaving Sebastian to make his way back home alone through the "vegetable light." Sebastian sits playing chess by himself now, drinking "bitter tea," dwelling on his loneliness. In the "deep blue winter evening" he recalls an earlier trip of his own to New York City, remembering dirty snow, pigeons, burnt fried potatoes, a streetcar, and, most vividly, a stripper who "rolls her buttocks" while "rhinestones cover her bee-stung / Pussy and perch on each nipple." But this reverie only intensifies his feeling of separation "through the level days," and his preoccupation with death. It is Good Friday, and Thomas reenters the poem involved (like Tammuz, the slain harvest god) in some sort of "involuntary" sacrifice, the martyrdom Sebastian fears. "How short a time for a life to last," the third voice muses, "So few years, so narrow a space, so / Slight a melody, a handful of / Notes."

Part III is subtitled "The Double Hellas," and here we have sexuality split into its two guises—the erotic and the domestic. We get a sense of the inexorable process of time as the section opens with a description of the earth's movement into and out of the ice age. Following, there is a description of the brothers' early pastoral life ("The yellow lights, the humming tile stove, / Father with his silver flute, / Mother singing to the harmonium") but, as Gibson suggests, this environment embodies the "bourgeois-Christian-Classical tradition" which is now, for them both, merely an "ornate, wasted fiction." The erotic is introduced as Sebastian strolls through the garden while "The floral vulvas of orange and crimson / Squirm inside his head." There are allusions to Kore (Persephone, whose yearly return to the world from Hades symbolized fecundity), Chlorus (beautiful wife to King Neleus), "Pisanello's courtesans," and Maxine (the Black stripper from part II), but these only seem to confuse Sebastian further. In the modern world there seems to be no room for passion, no room for the heroic: "the epic hero / Came, in full armour, making a huge / Clatter, and fell, struck down from behind / … the clock ticks measured out his death." As Maxine sleeps in her far-off "scented bed," Sebastian reads Socrates on love in solitude. "Shall personal / Loneliness give way to the enduring / Geological isolation?" he wonders. Meanwhile, Thomas comments on the nature of the family estate, "a land too well-mannered" where "the bedrooms / Mold with the sweat of bygone death beds." Unlike Sebastian, he has a distinct lack of interest in domestic sexuality: "Her thighs, her buttocks rolling like two / Struggling slugs—these things are not for me," for the "echoing in the tunneled / Sepulcher" presages death.

What follows is a meditation on presence, a comment by the third narrative voice. The beautiful world of the thing—a new brick warehouse, lovers, cattle—is for Thomas his "sacrament," an "undeniable reality": "Heraclitus said that the world was made / Of the quick red tongue between her lips, / Or else from the honey that welled up / From the shady spring between the thighs." But again, like "the tree, moon isolate / In a moonless night, stiffens in an / Explosion of wind and rips off every / Leaf," the human world is ever-winding down, ever deteriorating, "Dun camels in the smoky desert, / The Pyramids gone crimson into time." All that is left us is "music of objects worn by careful hands."

The final section of Homestead, "The Stigmata of Fact," continues with images of death and deterioration: "chalk old skulls," "a crumbling kingdom," "assassins everywhere," "the thick dust / settles once more on the disordered / Bones in their endless sleep." Such is Thomas's "brilliant / Summer region, his painted landscape." For a time, Sebastian is able to make a leap of faith ("I am the Master of the / Pattern of my life") which leads him momentarily to his dying mother and Maxine; in the end, though, he finds himself a kind of Prufrock, "Dead? / No, living with a limitless sterile / Kind of life … naked, / Blind, salty, and relaxed on the edge / Of the blind sea alone with the blind rabbi." The great myths—Theseus, the Minotaur, the labyrinth, the Easter Island statues—have been reduced to dust by modern archaeology. Leaving Sebastian "puzzled" in the rain-soaked slums, Thomas retreats to the mountains, leaving the lights of the modern city to disappear behind the "tiny, closing doors of silence."

In Homestead, then, we have a number of themes which Rexroth will return to again and again. The brothers are a kind of split consciousness—the active (Sebastian) over against the reflective (Thomas); or, as Gibson prefers, "the tendency toward sacrifice and martyrdom, and the restraining tendency of skeptical withdrawal from commitment"—a split the poet will struggle with in himself throughout his life. There is the Romantic's despair over the passing of both the mythic imagination and the natural world, along with an intense sense of carpe diem. And perhaps most important, there is a seeking after the fact of heterosexual love, which in the contemporary world has seemingly lost not only its sacramental nature but its significance as a transformative power as well. Unlike Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach lovers, Thomas is left not with the grail but squatting in the darkness at a fire, alone.

Rexroth began "A Prolegomenon to a Theodicy" in 1925 and finished it two years later; this poem didn't appear until 1949, however, when it was included in The Art of Worldly Wisdom, and it has never been published separately. While Homestead is in large part meditative, "A Prolegomenon" is more experimental; in fact the severe dissociation and juxtaposition are reminiscent of Cubist painting, an interest of Rexroth's at the period.

Though the case might be made that here Rexroth was primarily concerned with stylistic possibilities, the poem's primary argument continues the movement of Homestead. A prolegomenon is a preface, an introduction; a theodicy is the concept of the vindication of the goodness of God in respect to the existence of evil. If God is supremely good and supremely powerful, goes the age-old Christian paradox, and if he cannot make an error, how is it that evil can exist in the world? The poem continues the despair of Homestead in its opening section: "I want something else / I want and want always wear and wear / Always / Always / But you can't have it don't you realize there / Isn't any more there isn't any more at all not / At all". The next many sections provide catalogues of objects, actions, concepts seen through the "anagogic eye," as Rexroth moves for resolution, not through logic but after "the visionary experience without which no theodicy is possible". By the poem's conclusion, its Christian imagery emerges fully developed ("The bread of light / The chalice of the abyss / The wine of flaming light"), as the poet has moved through a kind of apocalypse to the appearance of God. To my mind, this odd poem offers no satisfactory solution to its own paradox, save a kind of willed acceptance; certainly its primary question continues Rexroth's search for some kind of transcendent vision (though interestingly there is little if any reference to the power of physical love here), but finally it seems a mere exercise.

With The Phoenix and the Tortoise (the title poem of his second book, published in 1944), Rexroth has settled into his more mature style, and here he engages far more directly the question of "the Community of Love" he spoke about in the introduction to The Homestead and the Cubist experiment of "Prolegomenon" in favor of the far more direct, personal statement we have come to associate with Rexroth's mature work (as well as that of Western poets for whom he has been a direct influence, like Gary Snyder and William Everson). Further, the poet's political engagement becomes an important element in this poem, and it is the first of the long poems which is set, at least in part, in California.

The entire collection (the volume also contains a number of shorter lyrics, as well as translations and "imitations") attempts to develop, Rexroth tells us in his introductory note, "more or less systematically, a definite point of view … the discovery of a basis for the recreation of a system of values in sacramental marriage." Phoenix attempts "to portray the whole process" ("from abandon to erotic mysticism, from erotic mysticism to the ethical mysticism of sacramental marriage, thence to the realization of the ethical mysticism of universal responsibility") in "historical, personal, and physical terms." He dedicates the poem to Albert Schweitzer, "the man," he says, "who, in our time, pre-eminently has realized the dream of Leonardo da Vinci."

Like the first long poem, we have again a quest of sorts, as Phoenix opens with the poet meditating on "the geological past / Of the California Coast Ranges," figures of death along the coast:

Of what survives and what perished,
And how, of the fall of history
And waste of fact—on the crumbling
Edge of a ruined polity
That washes away in an ocean
Whose shores are all washing into death.
A group of terrified children
Has just discovered the body
Of a Japanese sailor bumping
In a snarl of kelp in a tidepool.

The poet is again a seeker, "seeking the continuity, / The germ plasm, of history, / The epic's lyric absolute." What, he asks, is the relationship between art and history; can anything transcend the ravages of time? History, he tells us, is composed of mere "particulars," while poetry offers "an imaginary / Order of being, where existence / And essence, as in the Diety / of Aquinas, fuse into pure act." The first section concludes with a privileging of this imaginary order, this mystic vision ("The illimitable hour glass / Of the universe eternally / turning") over such notions as will and ego.

In the next two sections of the poem, lying under the moonlight in his "folded blanket" next to his wife while "north of us lies the vindictive / Foolish city asleep under its guns," the poet expresses his anarchism: "The State is the organization / Of the evil instincts of mankind"; "War is the State"; "Man is a social animal; / That is, top dog to a slave state." The goal of history "is the achievement / Of the completely atomic / Individual and the pure / Commodity relationship … / The flow of interoffice / Memoranda charts the excretions / Of societal process, / The cast snakeskin, the fleeting / Quantum, Economic Man." This angry meditation on modern life and organizational man rumbles through the night until at dawn the poet wonders "would it have been better to have slept / And dreamed, than to have watched night / Pass and this slow moon sink?" Perhaps his wife's "dreams" hold more of an answer than his own "meditations in cold solitude."

A resolution to death and decay, and to man's own corporate stupidities and inhumanities, is offered in the poem's concluding section, wherein like Voltaire's Candide Rexroth turns to the garden of the personal:

Babies are more
Durable than monuments, the rose
Outlives Ausonius, Ronsard,
And Waller, and Horace's pear tree
His immortal column. Once more
Process is precipitated
In the receptive womb.
In the decay of the sufficient
Reasonableness of sacraments
Marriage holds by its bona fides.

Nude, he enters the water, "the prime reality," and it is the sudden appearance of his wife, also naked, which offers a transcendent, even beatific vision, a final alternative to dead men "in the ancient rubbish": "The sun crosses / The hills and fills her hair, as it lights / The moon and glorifies the sea / And deep in the empty mountains melts / The snow of Winter and the glaciers / Of ten thousand years."

The Dragon and the Unicorn (written between 1944 and 1950, and published in 1952) opens where Phoenix leaves off; if love is the answer to the paradox of history, just what is its nature? Written in the direct style of the earlier poem, this is by far Rexroth's longest poem (running over 6,000, primarily seven-syllable, lines), and certainly one of his most fully realized. While the setting of Phoenix is northern California, Dragon follows the poet across America, through Europe, back to San Francisco. As Rexroth notes in his preface to the volume, "The form is that of the travel poems of Samuel Rogers and Arthur Hugh Clough. The general tone is not far removed from that expressed by other American travelers abroad, notably Mark Twain." Yet again the poet is off on a quest, and yet again the quest is bodied forth, as Gibson notes, "as interior monologue of Rexroth's inquiry into the problem of love."

The first of the poem's five parts takes Rexroth (by Phoenix, at the very least, the question of an Eliotic persona no longer obtains, the speaker is, clearly, the poet himself) by train from San Francisco to New York, then through the British Isles. Like the previous poem, the political dimension is paramount, as Rexroth again assails the modern city as well as the corporate state. In Chicago, for example, "Man / Gets daily sicker and his / Ugliness knots his bowels. / On the site of several / Historical brothels / Stands the production plant of / Time-Luce Incorporated"; in Liverpool, he sees "bombed-out shells, / Everybody too busy / To fix them up. So Rome died." Set against the city, however, he discovers North Wales "glowing with Spring—/ Birds and wild flowers everywhere," while

High above Yarcombe the wind
Dies at sunset and I rest
In a hanging meadow. The land
Falls away for long blue miles
Down the trough of glacial valley.
In the deep resonant twilight
The stars open like wet flowers.

Yet he returns to London, a place "sicker than New York," as the answer to his quest is not in the solitude of the pastoral, but again in a kind of human communion: "There is no reality / Except that of experience / And experience is the / Conversation of persons." There he searches (often humorously, as with "Nini" a sadist who "gets quite rough") for love, "the ultimate / Mode of free evaluation. / Perfect love casts out knowledge."

At the start of Part II, Rexroth receives copies of The Art of Worldly Wisdom, but finds in his new book's pages not the intensity of experience but "only anecdotes for company"; "I cannot find the past." The setting for this section is France, and the tone throughout is rather grim, as the poet meditates both on his own failed attempts at love and the excesses of history. Traveling along the Loire he muses that "Ultimately the fulfillment / Of reality demands that / Each person in the universe / Realize every one of the / Others in the fullness of love." Here the institution of the Church, another manifestation for him of the corporate state, "is the symbol / Of the repression of all / That I love in France." Sexual love offers an alternative, but "only for so brief a time." Rather, it is a deeper, more lastingly transcendent love, a true communion or community, that "like all the sacraments, is a / Miniature of being itself."

In part III the scene shifts to Italy, where Rexroth travels now with his wife, Marthe. Again, he broods on the evils of collectivity—from capitalism and the Church to the State and various intellectuals; even social activism is not immune. Echoing Henry Treece's manifesto delineating the New Apocalypse aesthetic of such younger British poets as Alex Comfort and Vernon Watkins, that "the salvation of the individual man is via the individual man himself and not by way of the Commonwealth, the State, or the International Collective," Rexroth writes:

I know of
No association of men
Which cannot be demonstrated
To have been, ultimately
Organized for purposes
Of coercion and mutal
Destruction. By far the worst
Are the putative communal
And benevolent gangsters. Lawrence pointed out long ago
That the most malignant form
Of hate is benevolence.
Social frightfulness had increased
In exact proportion to
Humanitarianism….
Every collectivity
Is opposed to community.

And again, that community is realized through a sacramental, personal, heterosexual love that in the modern world is constantly in danger of perversion. The only absolute, the only hope of salvation, is the "full communion of lovers," and the section ends in a kind of fulfillment of his vision, with Marthe pregnant.

Section four takes the poet first to Switzerland (here he takes issue with Protestantism—"the anal ghost of Karl Barth's church / Of spiritual masochism"—and Jung) then back to Paris and Bordeaux (where he rejects Marxism—"No collectivity against / Collectivities can function / To restore community"). Finally, in section five Rexroth returns to America, and as he travels back across land to San Francisco, he is not pleased: "Calvinist and Liberal / Both strive to reduce moral / Action to the range of the / Objectively guaranteed"; "In Kansas even the horses / Look like Landon, ugly parched / Faces like religious turtles." Through capitalism, the East and heartland have become "a ruined country," their inhabitants "a ruining people," though as he moves west out of the morass of the great Eastern cities his black mood lifts. Here, out of "the world of purpose," he comes to understand that "the community of persons" transcends even the need for a god. Once again he has returned to the garden of his West to achieve in nature a transcendence of the "empiric ego."

The last of the long poems, Heart's Garden / The Garden's Heart, was written over twenty-five years later, in 1967 in Kyoto. The scene is Japan, and once again we have the wandering, meditative, now older poet: "A man of / Sixty years, still wandering / Through wooded hills, gathering / Mushrooms, bracken fiddle necks, / And bamboo shoots, listening / Deep in his mind to music." The mood is Taoist, feminine ("The dark woman is the gate…. / She is possessed without effort"), but again he is lost and confused. Pilate's question in Dragon appears again, "what is love," but now in his old age Rexroth seems to move beyond argument in favor of, as Gibson argues, complete presentation: "The poem is vision; for the sounds and silences of speech unify the poet's sensations. The unity, the harmony, of speech and perception is the Tao" (125). The other long poems, even Dragon, seem to strain for a vision, as if by enumerating the endless follies of contemporary civilization the poet will finally convince himself (and us) of the necessity of community. Here, however, Rexroth seems no longer to be struggling. The world, like the Tao, simply is, and it is lovely.

In Homestead, Rexroth had staked out his twin poles—the life of action (represented by Sebastian) over against the life of reflection (represented by Thomas). By the time of the publication of his collection of shorter poems, The Signature of All Things in 1950, however, he had already come to be drawn more closely to the latter. In that collection, which takes its title from the seventeenth-century mystic Jacob Boehme, he writes in the preface, "Perhaps the integral person is more revolutionary than any program, party, or social conduct." He is coming to accept Boehme's notion of reality, that "the whole outward visible world with all its being is a signature, or figure on the inward spiritual world … as the spirit of each creature sets forth and manifests the internal form of its body, so does the Eternal Being also."

I spoke earlier of Homestead as, at least in part, the young Rexroth's attempt to meet the challenge of Eliot's The Waste Land; certainly, Heart's Garden / The Garden's Heart in the same fashion works as a counter to Eliot's late great work, The Four Quartets. Where Eliot's earlier poem affects impersonal presentation, where it is discontinuous, where it is highly allusive, and where it offers at least in part a social critique, The Four Quartets strives for a more personal, discursive voice, is far less allusive, and eschews social critique in favor of what David Perkins calls "Romantic metaphysical exploration." All of this can be said of Rexroth's last long poem as well. However, throughout The Four Quartets we have the nagging sense that for all the richness of its imagery and insight Eliot's vision, tied specifically to an Anglo-Catholic theology in which the Church itself becomes the final point where "the timeless and time intersect," the final vision of the poem is rather narrowly and exclusively defined. Rexroth's final vision, on the other hand, for all its Asian imagery, is far more Emersonian, far more indigenously American, than Eliot's.

Through the first four long poems the poet's search for a perfect community of love takes him through most pathways of the world's maze, yet none offers an all-encompassing transcendent vision. Here, in his last years, as Eliot embraces the architecture of the Church and its mythologies, for Rexroth politics, literature, sociology all give way to the "music of the waterfall," as he returns to his Penelope, "the final woman who weaves, / And unweaves, and weaves again." And it is this return to nature, quietude, and the feminine which offers the final clarity of vision:

In the moon-drenched night the floating
Bridge of dreams breaks off. The clouds
Banked against the mountain peak
Dissipate in the clear sky.

"We are unaware that we live in the light of lights," Rexroth closes in his introduction to The Collected Longer Poems, "Because it casts no shadow. When we become aware of it we know it as birds know air and fish know water. It is the ultimate trust."