Rare Books

The complete poems of Kenneth Rexroth

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Description: Kenneth Rexroth is a poet of enormous achievement. The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth assembles all of his published longer and shorter poems, and includes a never-before-published selection of his earliest work. Rexroth's poems of nature and protest are remarkable for their erudition and biting social and political commentary; his love poems justly celebrated for their eroticism and depth of feeling. This is the definitive Rexroth volume.
Type: Rare Books(Opens in new tab)
Publication date: [2003]
Call number: 660872
Creator: Rexroth, Kenneth (1905-1982)(Opens in new tab)
ISBN: 1556591713

The collected shorter poems

Rare Books

This volume brings together all of Kenneth Rexroth's shorter poems from 1920 to the present, including a group of new poems written since the publication of Natural Numbers, drawn from seven earlier books. Among the American poets of the generation that came to prominence in the Forties, Kenneth Rexroth has been notable both for the independence of his personal voice and for his accessibility to the tradition of international avant-garde literature. He began writing and publishing in magazines at fifteen. His earliest work was personal and concrete, much like that of the Imagists. In his twenties he wrote in the disassociative style--sometimes called "literary cubism "--developed by Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Reverdy. This was not free association, but the conscious disassociation and recombination of the elements of the poem to achieve the highest possible level of significance. With his later books Rexroth moved back to a direct and classically simple form of personal statement. In this period he wrote the great nature poems, the love poems, and the contemplative lyrics that have established his reputation as one of the most important American poets.

660949

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Sacramental acts : the love poems of Kenneth Rexroth

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The love poems of a late California poet. In Open the Blind, he wrote, "The endless sky, the small earth / The shadow cone / Your shining / Lips and eyes / Your thighs drenched with the sea / A telescope full of fireflies / Innumerable nebulae all departing / Ten billion years before we ever / met."

660957

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Classics revisited

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"Poet, translator, essayist and voracious reader--Kenneth Rexroth was an omnivore in the fields of literature. The brief, radiant essays of Classics Revisted discuss sixty key books that are, for Rexroth, "basic documents in the history of the imagination." Ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Huckleberry Finn, these pieces (each three or four pages long) originally appeared in the Saturday Review."--Page 4 of cover.

660934

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American poetry in the twentieth century

Rare Books

One of America's leading poets and critics offers a major interpretation of the poetry and poets of modern America, from the radical bohemians at the turn of the century through the leftist poets of the twenties, the reactionaries of the thirties and forties, the gradual emergence of the San Francisco school after the Second World War, to the more recent poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder. It is a work of re-experiencing the poems themselves, and in the process Kenneth Rexroth provides a controversial new look at the standard authors and boldly redefines the value of such poets as Levertov, Moore, and Lowell. This new paperback edition has been supplemented by a complete index of poets and a list of suggested readings. --back cover.

660933

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In the Sierra : mountain writings

Rare Books

"Contained in this marvelous collection are transcendent nature poems, as well as prose selections from [Kenneth Rexroth's] memoir An Autobiographical Novel, newspaper columns, published and unpublished WPA guidebooks, and correspondence."

660953

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One hundred poems from the Japanese

Rare Books

A collection of Japanese poems accompanied by English translations by poet Kenneth Rexroth.

660936

The complete poems of Kenneth Rexroth

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You might also be interested in

The collected shorter poems

Sacramental acts : the love poems of Kenneth Rexroth

Classics revisited

American poetry in the twentieth century

In the Sierra : mountain writings

One hundred poems from the Japanese