They gave expression to the attitudes and opinions of most Americans. He writes: “What distinguished America’s major nineteenth-century writers was that, like the English, they were not alienated. He has kind words to say for Whittier, a popular poet whom he prefers to the more erudite Longfellow. But as a historian of American poetry, he is remarkably generous to all of the schools. Its great representative is Jefferson…Īccording to Rexroth, his native Midwest bore the mark of the melting-pot society of New France, “a very peculiar kind of France, bore more resemblance to Kievan Russia with its Varangian, Kazar, and Bulgar river-borne fur traders than anything to be found in the homeland…” He denounced “that voluntary Wasp, Leslie Fiedler, who finds the greatest spokesman of the riverain culture, Mark Twain, totally incomprehensible and like all uptight people when so confronted, he can only dismiss him as a homosexual, like a policeman confronted by a student with bare feet and long hair.”Ī bohemian with romantic anarchist and pacifist politics, Rexroth identified with the poetic avant-garde. The real Southern tradition was largely French, Girondin, rationalistic. The cavalier South, as Mark Twain pointed out, is a dream of chronic adolescents who read themselves to sleep with the novels of Sir Walter Scott. It simply is not true that there was a continuity in the Southern colonies of a cavalier tradition. In later life Rexroth discussed poetry on the radio in San Francisco, and the style of his book is conversational, complete with bombshell asides like this: The title notwithstanding, the book covers the entire history of American poetry, even though the focus is on the 20th century. This makes his book a sort of Secret History of American poetry, told by an insider who knew many of his subjects. Born in South Bend, Indiana, he was a genuine bohemian, who in the course of a long life and global travels met and befriended many of the leading figures of European and American literary circles. Rexroth is remembered today chiefly as a member of the post-World War II San Francisco counterculture, a mentor to the Beats and the author of numerous translations or recreations of Chinese and Japanese poetry. The best book ever written about American poetry is American Poetry in the Twentieth Century, published in 1971 by the poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982).
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