Kenneth Rexroth creates a world that has much in common with May Swenson's. Both poets see the universe, and themselves as part of it, as intricate combinations of essentially meaningless monads; both return insistently to sensuous, frequently sensual, modes of perception with which to penetrate the abstractions the human mind imposes upon reality; both use poetry as the means of exploring and coming to terms with being. But Rexroth, far more self-consciously philosophical, is more explicit in his search:

The order of the universe
Is only a reflection
Of the human will and reason.
All being is contingent,
No being is self-subsistent.
("They Say This Isn't a Poem")

What is it all for, this poetry…?
… The curious anastomosis of the webs of thought.
Life streaming ingovernably away,
And the deep hope of man.
("August 22, 1939")

An important distinction between Swenson and Rexroth must be made: while for the former the universe is simply horrifyingly neutral, for the latter it is chaotically destructive.

The great principles and forces
That move the world … have order
Only as a reflection
Of the courage, loyalty,

Love, and honesty of men.
By themselves they are cruel
And utterly frivolous.
The man who yields to them goes mad,
Kills his child, his wife or friend
And dies in the bloody dust….
("They Say This Isn't A Poem")

There is a tragic dimension in Rexroth's vision that Swenson's lacks; there is also a good deal more abstract thought, and far more specifically social concern. (Miss Swenson criticizes her society often by implication, occasionally directly; but there is nothing comparable to Rexroth's involvement with, say, the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, or the Spanish Civil War.) But these differences are perhaps more superficial than they first seem. Where Swenson writes of "Perpetual worlds … the world / a leaf within a wilderness of worlds," Rexroth says, "Each leaf is an encyclopedia." Only through the specific can the general be known. For all of Rexroth's philosophizing, he returns always to the concrete, not only for materials from which to draw abstractions, but more significantly to test again the nature of existence. After writing "of love and death, / High philosophy, and brotherhood of man,"

I contemplate the changes of the weather,
Flowers, birds, rabbits, mice and other small deer
Fulfilling the year's periodicity.

And the reassurances of my own pulse.
("Precession of the Equinoxes")

Carrying this to its logical conclusion, Rexroth does in fact become involved in the Hermetic doctrine of correspondences. "The Signature of All Things" and "The Light on the Pewter Dish" allude specifically to Jacob Boehme's view of the world, in which "the whole world, exterior andvisible … is but a sign of an appearance of the world that is interior and spiritual." But Rexroth was intuitively using the doctrine of correspondence as a poetic tool long before he stated it. For example, in a line quoted above, Rexroth refers to "The curious anastomosis of the webs of thought." Rexroth here associates the material, biological world with the world of thought, combines inner and outer, abstract and concrete. But the image is characteristically richer; anastomosis may refer to a human body or animal, or the veins of a leaf, suggesting a system of correspondences within the material world itself. Similarly, the preoccupation with stars and other heavenly bodies that is present from early poems to the comparatively recent "Andromeda Chained to Her Rock the Great Nebula in Her Heart," is clearly a manifestation of Rexroth's insistence that being in general, and human existence in particular, can be known in terms of macrocosm as well as microcosm. Boehme's theology becomes a convenient myth for Rexroth, as true in a world of interchangeable particles as in one informed by divine presence.

Poetically as well as intellectually, Rexroth is eclectic. His close observation of detail—although he at one time or another involves all the senses in his poetry he is a more exclusively visual poet than Swenson—his building of emotion and thought by juxtaposition as well as direct statement, can be traced to the Imagists, to Chinese and Japanese verse, perhaps to the Greek Anthology; like Yeats, he seeks a poem "cold and passionate as the dawn."

Although there is clearly development in Rexroth's work from its beginnings to the present, it is a qualified development. Early poems are tortured in syntax, heavily laden with the terminology and perspectives of science. Some of these, influenced by "literary cubism,"—for example, "Fundamental Disagreement with Two Contemporaries," "Into the Shandy Westerness"—are more thoroughly fragmentary than any discussed here. These characteristics are soon transformed from general style to occasional device; the clearly defined image, the terse philosophical statement become dominant modes. "Leaving L'Atelier-Aix-en-Provence," for example, one of Rexroth's best imagistic poems, comes not from the period when Imagists were dominant, but from Godel's Proof, New Poems 1965. These changes, however, are not dramatic; what is dominant in one period is usually present, or at least latent, in the others. Themes vary even less. Of course, contemporary events in the world at large, and in the poet's own life, are reflected in his poems; but the camping trips to the mountains, the concern with woods and stars, the sharp contrasts of the city, are present throughout, as is Rexroth's involvement in the human condition and his wish to order experience.

In one area, though, there is important change; Rexroth has never stopped experimenting with rhythms, which not surprisingly are crucial to the success of his poems. Here his work is most vulnerable; here his successes, when they come, are most striking. When in the fifties Rexroth hit upon the seven syllable line as a temporary resolution, he was accused of writing prose broken up into lines. But this is probably no truer than it was to say that the first poets to use run-on lines had destroyed meter; actually, on rereading, Rexroth's ear proves reasonably reliable. Later poems have abandoned the set line; length is adjusted to the experience being communicated, repetition of words and phrases become important sources of unity and coherence.

Rexroth's achievement may be minor; it is certainly limited in range. Very often his philosophical poems are indeed prosaic; his encounters with the Milky Way grow monotonous. But occasional reconciliations of the abstract and the concrete are remarkable. And Rexroth is a minor poet in the best sense of the word: his energies are devoted to the preservation, or rather the continuous renewal, of a language directly in touch with experience.