Professors and general readers alike have admired Rexroth's
essays in Classics Revisited, first appearing weekly in
Saturday Review from the mid-1960's, thanks to his friend
John Ciardi, the magazine's poetry editor. They were undoubtedly
read by more squares and philistines who were unfamiliar with his
poetry, than by beats and hippies. Young intellectuals, those who
read Marcuse and Sartre, Hesse and Ginsberg, Mao and Basho, dug
his poetry, his oriental translations, and his counter-cultural essays,
but seldom had patience with his historical breadth and philosophical
depth. Few understood that as poet and critic he was practicing
philosophy in its root sense of "love of wisdom," questing for the
good, the true, and the beautiful, in this barbaric age of capitalist,
fascist, and pseudo-communist exploitation, cultural collapse, wars,
and ecological disasters pointing to the annihilation of humanity.
Rexroth's remarks on Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Indian, Chinese,
Japanese, English, and American classics are those of a poet who
read many of them in their original languages, for pleasure and
personal insight rather than out of the need for degrees and
promotions. Unlike the coercive, authoritarian, and bureaucratic
rhetoric of Allan (The Closing of the American Mind) Bloom,
ex-Secretary of Education Bennett, Mortimer Adler and other
salesmen of the Great Books, Rexroth's vigorous style immediately
arouses our genuine interest in reading, rereading, and pondering the
classics, for joy and realization rather than out of any frustrating
obligation to be perfectly "educated" or "civilized." Rexroth also
illuminates Asian and modern classics along with ancient western
classics. And recommendations of the best translations, by one of our
greatest translators, are especially useful.
In accord with radical philosophical personalism, he thought
that the classics--"basic documents in the history of imagination"--
focus on "human individuals and their interrelationships." At a time
when many critics were reducing literature to myth, he wrote that
literary classics "objectify the crucial history of the subjective life,"
whereas myths "subjectivize the objective world." Structure, he
thought, inhering in life itself, should not be imposed artificially by a
writer. He also thought that because life itself is tragic, most classics
are tragic also, though often with comic ingredients. Like himself, it
might be added.
Now that many critics are devoted more to academic jargon,
methodologies, and status than to literature itself, it is a pleasure to
read Rexroth's brilliantly concise accounts of the tales of Gilgamesh,
Odysseus, Beowulf, Job, Oedipus, Socrates, Genji, King Arthur,
Macbeth, Julian Sorel, Huck Finn, and other heroes in a way that
draws us into the works themselves and their universal meanings
which "can be revealed but never explained": "The absurdity of life
and death, heroic wistfulness, nostalgia for lost possibilities,
melancholy of missed perfection," for example (3).
Rexroth gets at such universal meanings by indicating how each
classic reflects the human relations of its culture. For instance,
"Homer contrasts the societies of the Greeks, the Trojans, and the
Olympian gods as the three forms of political association that
prevailed in the Heroic Age...: the barbaric war band; the ancient,
Bronze Age, pre-Greek city-state; and the imperial court" (6). His
intricate sociological analysis of The Mahabharata, whether
or not it is upheld by continuing scholarship, would move even the
casual reader to want to explore Indian history. And because of
Rexroth's ecological outlook, which had developed ever since his
adolescence, he often shows how literature reflects relations of
humanity to the environment, most notably in the Finnish
Kalevala: "Its deep, resonant evocation of the natural
environment, the rich dark green or snow-white land of forests and
lakes and pastures where herdsmen, hunters, and fishers go about
their timeless ways; its strong matriarchal bias; its ironic acceptance
of the tragic nature of life; its dry humor; its praise of intelligence and
hospitality as prime virtues..." (25).
Rexroth illuminates all genres--fiction as well as poetry, drama
and history, autobiography and philosophy. He lamented, "What we
call philosophy today is a complicated method of avoiding all the
important problems of life" (80); but in the classics he finds wisdom
and virtue, sharing, for instance, Socrates' view of philosophy as "the
care of the soul--the moral integrity of the individual--and therefore
as a perpetual challenge to public apathy, ignorance, lack of integrity
or sensibility. 'Conscience judges power' is the meaning of
philosophy" (51). "The Socratic soul inhabits a metaphysical
democracy; the Platonic soul is the pinnacle of a rigid hierarchy of
splendid crystals" (54). Radiant epigrams like these are meant to
generate thought, not freeze it, and to improve our lives. "Lucretius is
the only major poet in all literature who dissents relentlessly from the
Social Lie... He... has remained one of the few thinkers... able to deny
the fear of death with the knowledge of ... total extinction. This, I
suppose, might be called the ultimate paradox of wisdom" (60).
In revisiting the wisdom of the classics, Rexroth does not slight
their artistry. He directs our attention to the rhythms of language, its
subtleties of meaning, the twists of intricate plots and multi-faceted
characterizations, as well as enduring ideas. "Whitman's philosophy
may resemble that of the Upanishads as rewritten by Thomas
Jefferson," he wittily tells us, then goes on. "What differentiates it is
the immediacy of substantial vision, the intensity of the wedding of
image and moral meaning. Although Whitman is a philosophical
poet, almost always concerned with his message, he is at the same
time a master of Blake's 'minute particulars,' one of the clearest and
most dramatic imagists in literature."
Rexroth might be faulted for omitting line-by-line analyses, for
sometimes oversimplifying complex works, for ignoring some of the
enigmas of critical theory, and for an old-fashioned concern for what
authors say--their ideas and world views. I myself regret that he
seldom reveals the full logical process of arriving at conclusions that
he presents so compellingly. In this respect he is more like Voltaire
than Bertrand Russell; but like both libertarian thinkers he
popularizes great ideas without vulgarizing them. As an introduction
for the common reader or the student just beginning to read literature,
or as an aid to the specialist interested in expanding his or her horizon
or the writer exploring the work of his great predecessors, Classics
Revisited cannot be beat.
In an "Afterword," Brad Morrow quotes from Rexroth's
appraisal of Tu Fu: "He has made me a better man... as well as, I
hope, a better poet." When I discussed this idea in my comparative
literature seminar at the University of Illinois, Chinese students
agreed with Tu Fu and Rexroth, regarding the idea as self-evident,
while American students, brought up on forms, techniques, and
methodologies, doubted that literature improved anybody.
Classics Revisited, along with More Classics
Revisited, like the books discussed therein and Rexroth's work
as a whole, does change lives.
The Alternative Society focusses on recent American
writing in relation to the mentality of permanent war. With Eye
and Ear covers the Far East, Christianity, world classics, and
American writing with versatility, though these essays are not as
startling as the earlier ones. American Poetry in the Twentieth
Century analyzes literary interactions among such communities
as the Indian, Spanish, French, German, English, Protestant, Catholic,
Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, and Negro, regional groups such as New
England Transcendentalists and Southern Agrarians, the Midwestern
and West Coast Renaissances, and movements such as Imagism,
Cubism, Marxism, and the Beats, never failing to point up unique
achievements of individual poets, though judgments are frequently
reductive.
In his longest study, Communalism: from Its Origins to the
Twentieth Century, Rexroth examines bizarre, chaotic, and
sometimes immoral but always idealistic attempts to re-create
communities of free-association (1x), the "Libertarian Tradition"
from the Neolithic Village, through Christian mysticism and some
Near Eastern and Russian communities, into more than a century of
American utopianianism that culminates in the "Post-Apocalyptic
Communalism" of the 1960's (229). Those communes have been the
most successful, ethically and practically, he claims, that have been
held together by powerful religious or ideological commitments,
charismatic leaders, well-planned divisions of labor, and ceremonial
celebrations of life.
This historical study clarifies many ideas alluded to, sometimes
enigmatically, in his poetry, and helps to justify his worldview.
However, there is no evidence that he ever lived in a commune after
deciding against a religious vocation in his youth. Rather than
retreating into a local utopia, he arrived at the mystical insight that
people are naturally in a universal community of interdependent
beings that is revealed and improved by world-wide networks of
artists, thinkers, revolutionaries, saints, and Bodhisattvahs. Vision
evolves from this pre-existing community, creates poems and other
forms of communication, and liberates and transforms persons. So
vision evolves from community and recreates community.
Humanistic revolution is the development of transpersonal values
inherent in the universal community of beings, whereas collectivism
is coercively depersonalizing, in his view. communitarian
personalism kept him free of the authoritarian left and right and of
American capitalism disguised as democracy. He held out for liberty,
compassionate action, voluntary association, mutual aid, and a
community of love arising from I-Thou communion. He
prophetically denounced alienation, exploitation, power-madness,
violence, war most of all, and refused to compromise his vision.
In World Outside the Window Bradford Morrow has
made an excellent choice of Rexroth's essays from earlier collections
of the prose, adding some uncollected essays and his own informative
Preface. In the earliest item, a hitherto unpublished speech entitled
"The Function of Poetry and the Place of the Poet in Society"
(1936), Rexroth argues that the poet, especially the modern poet,
"has been an enemy of society, that is, of the privileged and the
powerful," because the poet threatens established society by forever
making the language "a more efficient instrument for the control and
appreciation of experience." Rexroth goes on to show how poets also
evaluate experience, judge the world, and offer philosophical,
religious, and political views at odds with the social order. Rexroth
believed that as outcasts, poets of all kinds and viewpoints would
increasingly be allied with common people awakening to the need for
revolutionary change. But cautioning against any party-line
conformity, the anarchist poet concluded with an enticing quotation
from the Communist Manifesto: "From each according to his
ability, unto each according to his needs." Throughout his life,
Rexroth never wavered from his conception of the true poet as rebel,
visionary, and critic of society.
This revolutionary conception shapes his interpretation of D. H.
Lawrence as a prophetic poet, in an essay that has struck many
readers as his very best (1947), subtly exploring Lawrence's
sensibility, eroticism, ideas, and artistry, and boldly asserting that
poetry is vision, rather than mere artifice. "The Cubist Poetry of
Pierre Reverdy" (1969) is also a masterpiece, succinctly getting at
the essence of the Revolution of the Word. Rexroth's discussions of
the visionary paintings of Morris Graves, Turner, and Whistler are as
perceptive as his views of poetry. And in his critiques of the Beat
Generation and the counterculture, from the mid-1950's through the
1960's, he shrewdly distinguishes between true revolt (working
devotedly to overcome what Marx had called "human self-
alienation") and false revolt ("caricaturing the values of the very
civilization that debauched you in the first place," 74). In "Who Is
Alienated from What?" (1970) he examines Existentialist, Christian,
Marxist, Hegelian, and Psychoanalytical interpretations of alienation,
placing his hopes on the creative estrangement of artists and writers.
His radicalism is consistently ethical as well as aesthetic, going to the
roots of the human spirit. So he suggests that the beauty of Asian art
and poetry offers many Americans relief from self-alienation.
Because of Rexroth's intellectual and spiritual maturity, his
views on such esoteric subjects as gnosticism, Thomas Vaughan's
alchemy, and Japanese Buddhism cohere with those on social
conflicts, for he shows how the inner light, transmitted through the
arts, changes the world. For literary readers who may or may not be
philosophically inclined, there is abundant wit, humor, insight, and
information in discussions of French and Japanese influences on
American poetry, and in "The Art of Literature" from the 1974
Encyclopedia Britannica.
Rexroth can be faulted for being "hipper than thou," for
sarcastic and belligerent reductionism applied to his enemies, and for
enthusiasms that are not always transmitted convincingly. But even
when he is not exactly right, he is never far from wrong, never trivial,
never dull, always challenging, and often wise. World Outside the
Window will reach several generations of readers--those of us
whose minds were expanded by Rexroth's work during his lifetime,
and others who have discovered him since his death. Old fans may
regret that certain essays were not reprinted--"American Indian
Songs," "My Heads Gets Tooken Apart," those on Kenneth Patchen
and Henry Miller, and critiques of Christian theology are some of my
favorites--but no one will be perfectly satisfied without a complete
collection of Rexroth's essays.
Out of his family's radical heritage he had, as a child,
committed himself to the liberation of humanity, later participating in
the Revolution of the Word, and of the Deed. But his optimism was
dashed by World War I. Though much serious post-war literature
signaled the collapse of the idea of progress, he nevertheless retained
some hope for social and cultural revolution. Like Trotsky, he
thought that the Russian Revolution had been betrayed; but he
believed it had been betrayed by Trotsky as well as by Stalin and
Lenin--by Bolshevism, which had violently and dictatorially violated
the I-Thou of personal trust, love, and responsibility no less than had
capitalistic "democracy." Inspired by Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy,
Emma Goldman, and Spanish syndicalists, he swam in the main-
stream of anarchism, which was not for him merely activism against
state-power, but a mystical movement of interpersonal realization of
universal responsibility for all beings, non-human and human. So
anarchism blended non-dualistically with ecology, Christian
mysticism, and Buddhism.
Distrusting systems of all kinds, Rexroth did not write a
definitive prose work philosophically uniting the major dimensions of
his world-view, which are drawn together in his poetry more
intricately than in his prose. For a clearer and more detailed sense of
his intellectual development, we need a collection of his most
important introductions, some to volumes of his own work and some
to his editions of the work of others, along with hitherto unpublished
prose. His Introduction to The New British Poets, for
instance, offers an ever-fresh "neo-romantic" alternative to the
impersonality of much modernism. And one of his last essays, the
introduction to The Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn,
offers a concise exposition of Japanese Buddhism that illuminates his
own poetry. Rexroth might well be praised as he praised Hearn, for
helping to prepare the West for the Japanese sense of nature and of
Dharma (27), so vital in the wisdom of Rexroth's poetry and prose.
And what is wisdom? Since ancient times in Asia and in the
West wisdom has meant not mere learning, but profound insight or
realization of life and death in the double sense of creating as well as
understanding reality and truth. Out of favor in our technocratic age,
wisdom has never been needed more than today. More than most
modern intellectuals, the prose and poetry of Kenneth Rexroth
transmits wisdom from what the Japanese call Kokoro --the one
heart-mind that is all and yet nothing.
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Copyright © 2000 by Morgan Gibson
Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry