Lyrical “Rage” (1957)
Review of Kenneth Rexroth’s In Defense of the Earth
The fineness of Kenneth Rexroth’s In Defense of the Earth depends on several virtues. They are virtues which are rare in this year but which are apparent in almost every one of the Rexroth poems: a lyric-mindedness that has been prepared by many disciplines to summon up its music; a learning that eats the gifts of the world, knowing (like the laboratory baby before the food) how many cultures must be drawn on to make human fare; and that quality which has been talked about so much in speaking of Kenneth Rexroth and of those he has known in San Francisco: rage.1
The poems included in the collection are the whole background of lyrics written by Kenneth Rexroth since 1949.2 Here is the exquisite “Great Canzon”:
. . . She, when she goes
Wreathed in herbs, drives every other
Gold with green—so lovely that love
Comes to rest in her shadow, she
Who has caught me fast between
Two hills, faster far than fused stone.3
And here are “the web” and “hidden crippled bird,” landmarks of the time when Morris Graves and Rexroth first knew each other and wanted the journey to Japan; here are the moving poems for his wife, Marthe, and for the little daughter, particularly “The Great Nebula of Andromeda,” “A Maze of Sparks of Gold,” and “A Sword in a Cloud of Light,” with its Christmas crowds on Fillmore Street, its Orion “spread out / On the sky like a true god,” and ending:
Believe in all those fugitive
Compounds of nature, all doomed
To waste away and go out.4
There are here also the whiplash “Bestiary”; a group of epigrams and translations; and the four-part memorial for Dylan Thomas with its shattering ubi sunt for the poets of these years, dead of all the deaths or
stopped writing at thirty . . .
How many went to work for Time?
How many died of prefrontal
Lobotomies in the Communist Party?
How many are lost in the back wards
Of provincial madhouses?
How many on the advice of
Their psychoanalysts, decided
A business career was best after all?
How many are hopeless alcoholics?5
The last part of the poem is for Dylan Thomas himself, and it carries its heaped-up accusation for murder against the specific anti-poetry, anti-religion—but you had better read this for yourself, since any description will sound like the frothing and rage with which the poem has been charged.
This would be rage, in the speaking man; and a shout and rant of frustration. But here, in the sparse, controlled poems it is something else and more: it is the sharp willingness to speak of the committed man. There is little enough control around anywhere this year, and less commitment.6 The sound of commitment comes through as the sound of anger. In these brief and disciplined poems of Rexroth’s we have the background and tradition of “Howl” and On the Road.7 The influence and the lyric commitment are shown naked here. They reach us, in love, jeering, bringing in other poetry from China and Japan. Read:
Lions terrify most men
Who buy meat at the butcher’s—8
and
What happened to Robinson,
Who used to stagger down Eighth Street,
Dizzy with solitary gin?
Where is Masters, who crouched in
His law office for ruinous decades?
[. . .]
Timor mortis conturbat me.9
It does not matter that Alethea made that same last crack in The Way of All Flesh; it is surely a crack as old as the Bible.10 But, in context this year, the lines knock against our lives. And now the poets come on, in their deaths and lives: Jim Oppenheim, Orrick Johns, Elinor Wylie, Sara Teasdale, Jack Wheelwright, Bodenheim, Edna Millay, Genevieve, Harry, Hart, and the rest of Rexroth’s line of poets.11
The title is right; this book is written “in defense,” and the parts are love, anger, willingness to act to protect. In these poems the qualities come through with marvelous strength, clarity, and music. This review has been held for long enough to let readers see how many critics talk of these poems in terms of rage, and talk of “Howl” and On the Road in terms of vitality. Again, this is not rage, but the commitment of a poet, coming through in the classic terms of our thought, in terms of our poetry of nature, and in terms of some attitudes identified here with Oriental religion—quite simply, attitudes largely neglected in our lives. Or, even more simply, in the words of a poet older than Rexroth, Robert Frost:
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the Light was spoken.12
Kenneth Rexroth is dealing with the plans of women and men in these magnificent poems, which are harsh, full of grace and certainty and grief: poems of the mountain nights, of the vast crystal of knowledge encompassing the limitless crystal of air and rock and water; of the people to be loved, the mountain animals, the nights of stars, and, on Fillmore Street, the night, the moon, the crowded earth.13
(Saturday Review, 1957)
1. After hosting the October 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, Kenneth Rexroth was regarded as the Beat Generation’s godfather. The 1957 obscenity trial for Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956), whose title poem was premiered at that reading, grabbed national attention the same year as Rukeyser’s review of Rexroth.
2. Since 1949, Rexroth had published three volumes: The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1949), The Signature of All Things (1949), and The Dragon and the Unicorn (1952).
3. Kenneth Rexroth, “The Great Canzon for Marthe,” in In Defense of the Earth (New York: New Directions, 1956), 17. Translation of Alighieri Dante’s “Canzone 1.” Rukeyser’s ellipsis.
4. Morris Graves, abstract expressionist painter influenced by his travels in Asia in the 1920s and 1930s. Rexroth translated Japanese and Chinese poetry but did not visit Asia until the 1970s. First quoted phrases (“the web,” “hidden crippled bird”) from Rexroth, “Marthe Away,” in Defense, 12. Final quotations from Rexroth, “A Sword in a Cloud of Light” from “The Lights in the Sky are Stars,” in Defense, 22.
5. Rukeyser mentions two sections: Rexroth, “A Bestiary” and “Epigrams and Translations,” in Defense, 60–67, 75–80. She quotes from Rexroth, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” part 3, in Defense, 56–57. Rukeyser’s ellipsis. The long poem memorializes Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and uses tropes from Ginsberg’s “Howl,” including Time magazine, lobotomization, and madhouses. See note 1 above. Ubi sunt is Latin for Rexroth’s refrain, “where are they.”
6. Leftist “commitment” seemed impossible. In September, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, furiously protested by Dixie Democrats. The anti-communist Red Scare also continued, and the nuclear arms race accelerated.
7. Together, Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” (1956) and Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957) established the Beats as the American literary counterculture’s vanguard. See notes 1 and 5 above.
8. Rexroth, “Jackal” from “A Bestiary,” in Defense, 63. Rukeyser’s em dash.
9. Rexroth, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” part 2, in Defense, 54. Quotation abbreviated. Rexroth names twentieth-century poets Edward Arlington Robinson and Edgar Lee Masters. In this part of the long poem, the Latin refrain Timor mortis conturbat me (“Fear of death disturbs me”) ends every stanza.
10. Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903), a British novel satirizing Victorian attitudes about life and morality. Overton, the narrator, not Alethea, notes early on that, as children, they liked the idea of someone else’s death. Others’ funerals meant that they had not died and, as mourners, they even would receive a consolatory treat.
11. Modernist poets named in “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” part 2, including Maxwell Bodenheim, Genevieve Taggard, Harry Crosby, and Hart Crane.
12. Robert Frost, “Once by the Pacific,” in Collected Poems (New York: Henry Holt, 1939), 314.
13. Fillmore Street, a San Francisco thoroughfare. In 1956, the Fillmore District was singled out for race- and class-motivated gentrification.