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POETRY’S REVIVAL: KENNETH REXROTH AND THE SAN FRANCISCO
RENAISSANCE

By

Michael T. Van Dyke

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
American Studies

1999

ABSTRACT

POETRY’S REVIVAL: KENNETH REXROTH AND THE SAN FRANCISCO
RENAISSANCE

By

Michael T. Van Dyke

This dissertation examines Kenneth Rexroth’s cultural vision, a vision that included the
idea of a poetry renaissance, but that also saw an enlivened poetry scene as the
foundation of a new, alternative culture in the post-World War II era. Rexroth saw the
poetry reading as an avenue for reintegrating the “religious experience” of humanity into
a moribund culture, and it is the comprehensiveness of his vision that sets him apart from

the Beats and the philosophies their writings would seem to espouse.

I would like to dedicate this dissertation with gratitude to Dr. David T. Bailey, my
intellectual mentor; to my parents, Thomas and Mary Van Dyke, who never ceased to
encourage me; to my in-laws, Gary and Betsy Clark, who opened their home to us when
we needed it; and finally to Beth, Caleb and Emma, who endured too many lonely
evenings.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Chapter 1
Rexroth’s “Populist Avant-Garde”: Jazz, Emerson
and Cultural Renewal in the Post-War Era 23

Chapter 2
The Poetics of History: Some Influences on Rexroth’s
Historical View of Culture 47

Chapter 3
“The Measure of the Defect of Vision is Visions”:
The Religious Anarchism of Kenneth Rexroth and the

San Francisco Renaissance 74
Chapter 4

Kenneth Rexroth and the “Regional Imperatives” of _
the San Francisco Renaissance 102
Chapter 5

The Half-Way Revolution: Rexroth, the Beats, and

Beyond 131
Conclusion 162

Bibliography 169

iv

INTRODUCTION

“We have met to preserve the minimum conditions under which creative work is

possible. We have not met to form a literary school or to persuade each other of

the advisability of our individual techniques. We have not met to discuss

Proletarian art, Surrealism, or heroic couplets. As writers we can make a

significant gesture of defiance in the faces of those who are trying to remove

America from the civilized world. But alone we cannot do very much else. "

(Kenneth Rexroth, “The Function of Poetry and the Place of the Poet in Society,”

Address to the Conference of Western Writers in San Francisco, November,

1936)

“As an art, literature is the organization of words to give pleasure; through them

it elevates and transforms experience; through them it fimctions in society as a

continuing symbolic criticism of values. " (Rexroth, “The Art of Literature,” The

Encyclopedia Britannica, 15‘” Edition, 1974)

In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Kenneth Rexroth served as the intellectual and social
facilitator of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. This fact has often been
acknowledged, but never fully explored [1]. Without Rexroth’s presence in the Bay area
from the late 1920’s onward, the ground would never have been prepared for any sort of
literary and cultural flowering in the post-World War II era. Moreover, the Renaissance
cannot be fully understood if not seen as largely the result of his careful nurturing of a
cultural agenda through writing, organization, and intellectual mentorship. Yet the
Renaissance itself did not fulfill the full scope of Rexroth’s enduring cultural vision. In
fact, in many ways it fell far short.

This study is an exploration of that cultural vision; the way in which it was
aligned with certain long-standing currents within American culture; and the way in
which it both prompted, and served as a critique of, what eventually happened in San

Francisco in the mid-1950’s. Though I see Rexroth as on a par with Ralph Waldo

Emerson and Ezra Pound as a shaper of literary conscience and consciousness within a
community of writers, and as a model for the conjunction of literary values and social
concerns, I also acknowledge that I am in the minority in that judgment, since he has
been comparatively overlooked by historians of American literature and culture [2].

Indeed, twenty years after his death, only a handful of critical studies regarding
Rexroth’s life and work exist, despite numerous contemporary testimonials to his
formative presence. Reasons for this neglect include a growing critical fascination for the
Beat movement as opposed to the long-standing history of literary experimentalism and
social radicalism in the San Francisco area, the difficulty of categorizing Rexroth’s own
writings, and the crusty personality of the man himself.

Nevertheless, Rexroth’s contributions to West Coast, indeed to American and
world culture, cannot be so easily overlooked As I hope this study will show, he shaped
the literary and social environment of which the Beats were benefactors, and kept alive a
vision of humane civilization based on deep learning and pragmatic intelligence. He was
in the “American grain,” yet talked constantly about the dangers of American
provincialism. He considered himself at various times either a Catholic or a Buddhist
' (even while working for the Communist Party), yet was ecumenical in his emphasis on
the religious experience as primary. He embraced ideals that bridged the cultural chasm
between Asia and “the west,” and propagated a social philosophy of organic
“communalisrg” even while he lived the life, indeed almost the archetype, of the rugged

American individualist.

The contradictions are sometimes glaring, and the failings not a few, but the
exhilarating vision of a good society kept alive through the primacy of poetry is
Rexroth’s enduring and original contribution to a culture that is still struggling to live up
to the visions of its prophets and teachers. And although much of this study will focus on
how Rexroth attempted to flow within what he perceived to be the revolutionary and
revitalizing currents of his time, his will to invest himself in the furtherance of those
currents made him into one of the few, unique intellectuals in American history who
actually made a difference.

o

When Kenneth Rexroth was twelve years old in 1918, he read HG. Wells’s
novel, The Research Magnificent. The book itself has largely passed from the memory of
even the most well-read literary critics, but its effect upon a highly precocious,
midwestem American boy who was less than a year away from orphanhood was lasting
and profound In his old age, Rexroth was to list The Research Magnificent as one of the
ten books that most influenced the course of his life [3], and in his poem “The Bad Old
Days,” he associates it with one of the determinative crossroads of his life.

The summer of nineteen eighteen
I read The Jungle and The
Research Magnificent. That fall
My father died and my aunt
Took me to Chicago to live.

The novel describes the exploits and mental life if its hero, William Porphyry
Benham, a character in the classic mold of the nineteenth century British gentleman-

adventurer. WhatsetsBenhamapartisthatheisbotharomanticandarationalisttothe

nth degree, someone who has strongly assimilated the ongoing spirit of the
Enlightenment, and who deliberately and systematically puts its various implications and
extremities to the test.

Wells does not portray Benham as a mere abstraction, though, or as a test-case by
which he explores his own pet theories about the state of British or western culture.
Neither is Benham, precisely, a microcosmic model or cypher. Instead, the author draws
him as a fully incarnated intellectual force within the world of his travels and travails.

In the novel, Benham seeks out adventure in order to develop his character, will,
and intellect to their keenest potential. He is driven to question all boundaries and
confront every limitation that either culture or nature has imposed. For example, while
on safari in Africa, he walks out one night into the pitch-black forest and stays there until
morning so that he might confront his fear of the unknown He finds

“. . . It is in the lonely places, in jungles and mountains, in snows and fires, in
the still observatories and the silent laboratories, in those secret and

dangerous places where life probes into life, it is there that the masters of the
world, the lords of the beast, the rebel sons of Fate come to their own...” [4]

By the end of the novel, Benham has improved himself to the point where he is
able to look upon himself as a “spiritual aristocrat”- someone who stands apart not on
the basis of lineage, wealth or class, but on the basis of experience, and of the stock of
inward resources, particularly courage, that have been forged through that experience.

Again, for a bookish and adventurous boy like the young Rexroth, with no
outward claims to nobility, yet nurtured on classic American, midwestem democratic

ideals, and the idea that one’s station in life is not inherited but earned, the urge to

emulate Benham must have been irresistable. And whereas Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

was probably fundamentally important in the development of Rexroth’s social
conscience, it was the impact of The Research Magnificent that most accurately predicted
the unique place he would eventually hold within the history of twentieth century
American culture.

This study of Kenneth Rexroth’s influence upon one of the most significant
cultural and literary phenomenons of the post-World War 11 world proceeds upon the
assumption that he saw himself as a “spiritual aristocrat” within a profoundly democratic
cultural landscape, and that the clashing and attempted assimilation of these ideals fueled
the energy, and formed the symbolic strength, of his peculiar career as American
provacateur and man of letters.

Rexroth’s original sense of “apartness” was probably instilled by his mother
Delia, who alternately gave herself over to bohemian-artistic and aristocratic pretensions,
though she and her husband Charles were, in their lifestyle, closer to the aspiring
bourgeoisie who filled the mid-sized towns of upper Indiana and lower Michigan around
the turn of the century. Until her premature death in 1916, Delia took the young
Kenneth’s education upon herself, reading to him

“from books on history, the natural sciences, and the lives of great artists

and writers. She felt a great urgency to instill in her... son a sense of

independence, and implanted in him the idea of the moral value of

knowledge, or as Rexroth would later express it, that epistemology is

moral. She wantedhimtobeawriterandanartist, but urgedhimtomake

sure, above all else, to think things through for himself.” [5]

DeliaalsotaughthimnottobeashamedofthingsEdwardian, earlyMentieth-
century America was ashamed of, like sex. She believed that shame about natural things

caused people to transform the natural into something perverted and truly shameful. In one

of the most intimately revealing sections of An Autobiographical Novel, Rexroth relates a
childhood episode in which a little girl whose family had just come north confided in him
her desire for an assortment of sexual experiments that "puzzled and exasperated him."
Though he didn't lose his virginity with her, the whole experience left him feeling guilty,
primarily because of the stealthy and overly mature demeanor of the little girl. When he
told his mother about it she brought out a blackboard and diagrammed for him the basics of
human sexual behavior, as accurately and forthrightly as she could What she told him at
thetime,andhisresponsetoit, deservestobequotedinfull. He writesthatshe said:

"You must learn now that there are two kinds of people in the world -
people like us, and ‘common‘ people. The word for them is ‘vulgar,‘ and
one of the things that makes vulgar people vulgar is that they are dishonest
about life and about themselves. They pretend that many of the things we do
withourbodies don'texist, andiftheytalkaboutthemtheytalkaboutthem
in very funny ways. Things like this make these vulgar people sick and
crazy, and that's what is the matter with that little girl."

"What I learned fiom this first experience was rather the opposite of
whatImightbe supposedtohave learned Ilearnedthatotherpeople were
not as we were, but slightly demented, and demented in such a way that they
could easily become dangerous. And I learned that we, as more responsible
members ofsociety who knewbetter, hadtotakecareofthemasthough
they were sick. In fact, I gainedthe impressionthenthatthe society which
lay over against my family -— les autres, as the French say - was a helpless
anddangerousbeastthatwehadtotendand save from its ownirrationality.
Iratherdoubtifanythinginlifehasevercausedmetogiveupthis attitude.”
[6]

After the move to Chicago referred to in “The Bad Old Days,” the already
independent-thinking Rexroth found himself bereft of close supervision, and at odds with
the enforced conformity of the public school system. Thus, he began to explore the city

on his own at a time when the post-World War 1 Chicago literary renaissance was

reaching its peak. A whole range of artistic and intellectual activities, from jazz clubs to
little poetry magazines to the literary journalism of Ben Hecht and others, was beginning
to define Chicago as a cultural center apart from New York City.

The teenage Rexroth managed to gain access to a literary and artistic group that
met at the house of insurance broker Jake Loeb. Here he was exposed to the type of
cultural patronage he later imitated in his Friday evening get-togethers in San Francisco.
Through the conduit to culture that the Loebs provided, Rexroth was also exposed to the
primary works of modernism, and to such figures as Clarence Darrow, Sherwood
Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Eugene Debs, Ben Hecht, Margaret
Anderson, Eleanora Duse, Bertrand Russell, Isadora Duncan, Sergey Prokofiev, Big Bill
Haywood, Carlo Tresca, and John L. Lewis, all of whom passed through the Loeb house
at one time or another. [7]

He rounded out his education by participating in' the club and soapbox culture that
grew up in places such as Bughouse Square, the Pickle and the Green Mask (where
poetry was read to jazz for perhaps the first time ever. Langston Hughes read there, and
Rexroth himself was accompanied by the new musical rhythms as he read from Whitman
and Apollinaire [8]. This type of cultural landscape, supported by dozens of
bohemian/working-class neighborhoods, had taken form during the labor agitations of the
previous forty years, and bohemian Chicago made the incipient anarchist aware of all
sorts of unorthodox socio-political and sexual theories. He learned these, gaining
inspiration along the way, from some of the most prodigious auto-didacts in the city,
primarily ultra-radicals who had disassociated themselves from organized labor.

In 1924 and 1925 Rexroth traveled to the West coast and to France, where the
aged anarchist Alexander Berkrnan told him that his place was in the American West [9].
This confirmation seemed to settle within Rexroth the question over his his future home.
In the West he was drawn to the mountains and to the lack of Anglo-dominance, feeling
that he found a certain peace and spiritual center for his soul there. [10] It was also less
of a hothouse environment for an aspiring artist and writer [11].

In 1927 Rexroth and his first wife Andree, an epileptic who gained strength from
the activities afforded by Northern California’s natural surroundings, settled permanently
in San Francisco and quickly acclimated themselves. Rexroth soon began to publish his
poems in small magazines, and to establish some connections with the San Francisco
leftist community.

It was also around this time that he began to develop and refine his organic
philosophy of culture and history. Greatly influenced by the philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead, and even by medieval scholastic theologians like Duns Scotus, Rexroth came
to believe that human society, relationships, and meanings were best forged and managed
within a “religious” recognition of reality [12]. This sense of reality did not necessarily
emanate from a belief in a transcendent deity, but rather could be found as immanent
within the natural world and the most fundamental acts of human interaction. He came to
believe that all sustaining meanings and values arose out of experience and interaction,
and that these meanings and values contributed to an organic structure which the most

sensitive individuals could ascertain.

Rexroth illustrates this organic sensibility in his early poem, “Toward an Organic
Philosophy,” which records the poet’s perceptions of nature’s changes, dissolutions, and
tmderlying constancies, made during camping trips in the Sierra Nevada mountains. At
the beginning of the poem the camper/poet leaves the relative safety of his fire to wade
out, not unlike Wells’s William Porphyry Benham, into the night’s unknown offerings.

The glow of my campfire is dark red and flameless,
The circle of white ash widens around it.

I get up and walk off in the moonlight and each time

I look back the red is deeper and the light smaller. [13]

He notices the scattered remains of a family farm that had once encompassed his
campsite, and finds that parts of it are already being put to new uses.

Now there is nothing left but the foundations
Hidden in poison oak, and above on the ridge,

Six lonely, ominous fenceposts;

The redwood beams of the barn make a footbridge
Over the deep waterless creek bed;

The hills are covered with wild oats

Dry and white by midsummer.

I walk in the random survivals of the orchard. [14]

On the horizon, the moon and constellations maintain their coordinated places in
the heavens, while also seeming to add sympathetic comment to the poet’s own
recognition of immanent loss, rebirth, and fecundity.

Orion walks waist deep in the fog coming in from the ocean;
Leo crouches under the zenith.

There are tiny hard fruits already on the plum trees.

The purity of the apple blossoms is incredible.

As the wind dies down their fragrance

Clusters around them like thick smoke.

All the day they roared with bees, in the moonlight

They are silent and immaculate. [15]

The second part of the poem serves as a meditation on nature’s reluctance to
allow swift permutations within its order; seeming variations are only minor, albeit
evocative, discrepancies in relation to the deeper, nurturing processes (e.g. the hydration
cycle). And despite having his senses exercised to a preternatural degree, all of this
produces in the poet a serenity into which he can trustfully descend.

Once more golden Scorpio glows over the col
Above Deadman Canyon, orderly and brilliant,
Like an inspiration in the brain of Archimides.
I have seen its light overthe warm sea,
Over the coconut beaches, phosphorescent and pulsing;
And the living light in the water
Shivering away from the swimming hand,
Creeping against the lips, filling the floating hair.
Here where the glaciers have been and the snow stays late,
The stone is clean as light, the light steady as stone.
The relationship of stone, ice and stars is systematic and enduring
Novelty emerges afier centuries, a rock spalls from the clifi’s,
The glacier contracts and turns grayer,
The stream cuts new sinuosities in the meadow,
The sun moves through space and the earth with it,
The stars change places.

The snow has lasted longer this year
Than anyone can remember. The lowest meadow is a lake,
The next two are snowfields, the pass is covered with snow,
Only the steepest rocks are bare. Between the pass
And the last meadow the snowfield gapes for a hundred feet,
In a narrow blue chasm through which a waterfall drops,
Spangled with sunset at the top, black and muscular
Where it disappears again in the snow.
The world is filled with hidden running water
That pounds in the ears like ether,
The granite needles rise from the snow, pale as steel;
Above the copper mine the cliff is blood red,
The white snow breaks at the edge of it;
The sky comes close to my eyes like the blue eyes
Of someone kissed in sleep.

I descend to camp,

To the young, sticky, wrinkled aspen leaves,
To the first violets and wild cyclamen,

-10-

And cook supper in the blue twilight

All night deer pass over the snow on sharp hooves,

In the darkness their cold muzzles find the new grass

At the edge of the snow. [16]

The final section begins with the camper/poet at breakfast, noticing that his usual
companion, a hermit thnrsh, is absent, but that “His place is taken by a family of
chickadees.” The scope of his observation swifily widens to include the landscape as it
recedes in every direction, the constellations and planets as they are spread across the
sky, and the approach of a storm from the east. Yet the signs of disturbance in the
distance only serve to clarify the contemplative calm of the poet’s immediate
surroundings, and his own deep connectedness to its “wonderful mathematics in silence.”
The poet’s lot cannot be extracted from his organic involvement in a vast set of
meaningful relationships for which he himself provides only one possible loci.

He ends the poem with a summation of the resultant idea.

In the morning the trail will look like a sheep driveway,

All the tracks will point down to the lower canyon

“Thus,” says Tyndall, “the concerns of this little place

Are changed and fashioned by the obliquity of the earth’s

axis,

The chain of dependence which runs through creation,

And links the roll of a planet alike with the interests

Of marmots and of men.” [17]

By extension, drawing on the basic historiographical models of such historians as
Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler, Rexroth gradually accepted the idea that whole
cultures were organic phenomenons, that they lived or died dependant on the connection
between their ways of living and the essentially religious apprehension of reality

described above. Though Toynbee and Spengler can be taken to task for certain

-11-

inaccurancies in their use of evidence, intellectuals like Rexroth found their fundamental
intuition to be necessary for the maintenance of any sort of cultural hope in an age of
world war [18]. Ifculture was not an organic phenomenon, then mankind was truly
without hope.

As Depression loomed, Rexroth was already fully aware that Capitalism did not
nurture the religious sensibility required for cultural health, and he had a notion that
Communism also would fail in this regard. Throughout the 1930’s, even as he worked
for the Communist Party (1930-38), Rexroth maintained a basically non-ideological view
of culture and history. As shown in a series of letters to the poet Louis Zukofsky, he was
also beginning to throw off the romance of the proletariat and to regard poets as the true
forces for creating and maintaining organic health within a culture or community, since
they were more likely than anyone else to recognize organic connections and find values
within the immanence of that reality [19]. Then, if poets could somehow capture the
public sphere, they could also maintain a religious sensibility which allowed life’s
meanings to cohere. For Rexroth, the alternative was the growth of a superstructure of
values that would ultimately disintegrate all life-sustaining relationships.

As America became involved in the war against Hitler’s Germany in the late
1930’s, Rexroth cut his ties with the Communist Party and became more of an explicit
pacifist and anarchist, seeing the war as the final evidence that states were inevitably
imperialistic, war-like, and unconcerned about the fate of the masses.

It was also at this time that his own poetry gained its maturity, leaving behind

cubist, Objectivist and surrealistic tenets to become more clearly a poetry of direct

-12-

expression, the lucid communication of his own sensibility and experience. In 1940 he
published his first book of poems, In What Hour, which proved to be a major
contribution, along with the works of Robinson J effers and Henry Miller, to the
developing idea of a West Coast literary aesthetic. In fact, in 1984 poet Robert Hass
ackowledged Rexroth’s influence on his own work and made the spectacular claim that
In What Hour “invented the culture of the West Coast.” [20]

I disagree with critic Michael Davidson’s assessment that Rexroth’s poetry after
World War II was primarily a poetry of elegy [21]. An elegaic tone perhaps gauzes the
bulk of it, yet that tone is counter-balanced by a spark of optimism and hope for the
future arising out of the consistent reference to nature’s immutable and organic “orders of
being” As seen in his long poem, The Pheonix and the Tortoise, Rexroth considered
poetry to be the preeminent expression of experience, the assimilator of past and present
in a form that allowed sensibility to be the ultimate arbiter of reality. This poem links
together lyrics that are in turn imagistic/narrative, with those that are almost purely
philosophical/abstract, a form in which Rexroth presents his own personality,
alternatively relating his experience, and then his formulation of that experience, within a
general philosophy of life.

The efi'ect, when successful, is a fusion of philosophy and experience into the
ideal integration of insight and action, thought and life. Additionally, he creates a meta-
narrative concerning the possibilities of poetry for having a transformative effect upon
history. The following fragment can serve as a condensation of the entire work’s

structure and tone.

.13-

And 1,
Walking by the viscid, menacing
Water, turn with my heavy heart
In my baffled brain, Plutarch’s page—-
The falling light of the Spartan
Heroes in the late Hellenic dusk——
Agis, Cleomenes—this poem
Of the phoenix and the tortoise—
Of what smvives and what perishes,
And how, of the fall of history
And waste of fact—on the crumbling
Edge of a ruined polity
That washes away in an ocean
Whose shores are all washing into death.

A group of terrified children .

Has just discovered the body

Of a Japanese sailor bumping

In a snarl of kelp in a tidepool.

While the crowd collects, I stand, mute
As he, watching his smashed ribs breathe
Ofthe life ofthe ocean, his white

Torn bowels braid themselves with the kelp;
And, out of his drained grey flesh, he
Watches me with open hard eyes

Like small, indestructable animals—
Me—who stand here on the edge of death,
Seeking the continuity,

The germ plasm, of history,

The epic’s lyric absolute.

What happened, and what is remembered—
Or—history is the description

Of those forms of man’s activity
Where value survives at the lowest
Level necessary to insure

Temporal continuity.

Or “as the Philosopher says,”

The historian differs from

The poet in this: the historian
Presents what did happen, the poet,
What might happen. For this reason
Poetry is more philosophic

Than history, and less trivial.

-14-

Poetry presents generalities,
History merely particulars.

So action is generalized

Into what an essential person

Must do by virtue of his essence—
Acting in an imaginary

Order of being, where existence
And essence, as in the Deity

Of Aquinas, fuse in pure act.

What happens in the mere occasion
To human beings is recorded

As an occurrence in the gulf
Between essence and existence—
An event of marginal content. [22]

During the war, Rexroth used-his accumulated associations in the Bay area to
serve the cause of conscientious objectors. He himself applied as a CO, stating in a
letter to the local draft board that

“I am opposed to conscription on moral grounds. It is a violation of what, very

likely, is the sole important contribution of western civilization to the human race,

the fi'eedom of the individual, to use the words of Kropotkin or Voltaire, [or] the

inviolability of the individual soul, to use the words of Christian theology.” [23]

He went to work at a psychiatric hospital, and also began to form
anarchist/pacifist discussion groups in the city while harboring draft dodgers. Along with
numerous anarchist texts, Rexroth read the works of Christian and Buddhist mystics in
greater depth during this time, and was very impressed by the work of religiously based
pacifist groups, especially the Quakers, who strengthened his bias towards communal
models that grew out of a religious sense of reality. The Quakers he knew echoed his

own organicism in their belief that every manifestation of life had a sacramental,

irreducible meaning and value in relation to every other manifestation, and that to kill a

-15-

fellow human being was to inject an element of murder throughout a myriad of social
relationships [24].

Many of the later participants in the San Francisco renaissance came out of the
CO camps scattered throughout the Pacific Northwest. Several, including poet William
Everson, had met Rexroth during furlough trips to the city and were taken with his air of
cultural authority. Despite several fallings-out, Everson always claimed that Rexroth was
the crucial figure in the coalescing of San Francisco’s cultural mix into a significant
cultural movement [25].

Afier the war Rexroth’s own literary reputation finally solidified, also. He went
on reading trips to the East Coast, and won Guggenheim Fellowships that allowed him to
travel extensively throughout Europe for the first time. These travels would later become
the subject and substance of his long poem “The Dragon and the Unicorn.” But from the
standpoint of his effect on San Francisco culture, the most important activities Rexroth
undertook in the post-war period happemd on Friday nights at his home on Scott Street.

Rexroth’s Friday night at-homes occurred in 1946-47, and again in the early to
mid-1950’s. These primarily were events that gave the host the opportunity to give
lengthy monologues on poetry, anarcho—pacifism, religion, or whatever else happened to
pass through his mind. But there were also occasional reading lists that invitation-only.
participants were expected to be able to discuss. Some of the more prominent Bay area
citizens who attended these get-togethers were Lawrence F erlinghetti, Philip Lamantia,
Ruth Witt-Diamant, Robert Duncan, William Everson, Thomas Parkinson, and later,

Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. Duncan was to later say, “We were all brought up on

-16-

Daddy Rexroth’s reading list,” [26] pointing to the unique experience Rexroth provided,
since Duncan and Jack Spicer occasionally conducted similar discussion groups in
Berkeley. Linda Hamalian, who has interviewed all concerned, has written that

“Rexroth’s ‘ salon,’ however, had a distinctive edge noticeably absent in
Berkeley: a personality and charisma that were formidable. He dominated the
discussions and steered them in directions where he could assmne authority. He
espoused the avant-garde and reinterpreted the classical writers. He vigorously
and relentlessly reiterated his opposition to the Eastern establishment, thus
clearing the way for the counterculture that would break out in the next decade.”

[27]

Cotemporaneously, Rexroth took a leading part in a more politically-oriented
group that met on Wednesday nights. Those who attended considered themselves
philosophical anarchists and called their clique the Libertarian Circle. As a group, they
devoted themselves to the formulating and enacting of a viable anarchism, one that would
support a communal, non-coercive value-system [28]. Hamalian again reports

“. . . the group would discuss a single topic or author based on a reading list
that Rexroth had developed... There were works by fifty philosophers, political
theorists, psychiatrists, poets, and historians. On the list were six books about
Kropotkin, the leading theorist of anarchism, and three about the French Socialist
and anachist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Some of the better-known writers whose
names appeared were Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, William Godwin,
Bakunin, McTaggart, and Wilhelm Reich. Engels, Lenin, Tolstoy, Lao-tzu, Plato,
Aristotle, Bacon, Plutarch, and St. Simon were also included This group may
have sensed a great chasm between themselves and the administration in
Washington DC, but felt connected to like-minded groups in Britain, Europe,
and Asia. The meetings created an ambiance that would later help to foster the
San Francisco Renaissance.” [29]

The theme around which these two discussion groups coalesced was the moral
function of the writer. Contrary to certain aesthetes of the emerging avant-garde, Rexroth

consistently held out for the notion that writers could exercise a moral, value-forming

-17-

function in society [30]. To think otherwise was to succumb to a decadent mood of
despair. The writers that Rexroth promoted, whether classic or contemporary, hardly
ever were characterized by this mood, or at least not in Rexroth’s eyes. [31]

Rexroth exercised another direct intellectual influence in the immediate post-war
years that must be mentioned. In 1951 he began broadcasting book reviews over KPFA
radio out of Berkeley. Lewis Hill, a former CO. and Libertarian Circle-acquaintance of
Rexroth, had launched KPF A in 1946 as a listener-sponsored FM station that could
provide a larger forum for the exchange of views on cultural and political topics
throughout the entire Bay area [32]. A

Rexroth’s idiosyncratic reviews, many of which have been collected in two
volumes: Classics Revisited and More Classics Revisited, revitalized “academicized”
texts by making them relevant to the concerns of a post-war generation that was
witnessing the breakdown of social relations on all fronts, and beginning to reject the
values of past For example, his review of Gulliver ’s Travels asserts that the book has
always been perfectly understood by children and “common” people, while consistently
misunderstood by professional critics, since the former groups understand the position of
the Outsider, and are able to easily identify the absurdities of those in power [33].

Taken as a whole, Rexroth’s activities in the ten years following World War II
had a pronounced effect upon the intellectual, social, and artistic climate of San
Francisco’s nascent bohemian, radical and artistic communities. He advanced the notion
that an alternative culture must come to fruition, not through mere random acts of

disaffiliation, but through a consistent recognition of, and adherence to, alternative

-13-

cultural values inherent in the organic structure of reality. The fact that he saw poets as
the primary agents in the dissemination of these values is explicitly evident in much of
his prose throughout the middle of this century. That is why much of my argumentation
in this study will rely on Rexroth’s views as expressed in his essays, but hopefully not to

the entire exclusion of his poetic ouvre.

The 6 Gallery reading in 1955 is generally considered to have been the catalyst of
the San Francisco renaissance. Allen Ginsberg’s reciting of “Howl” ultimately brought
national attention to the San Francisco literary scene and to the “new poetry” that was
rising to contest the authority of New Critical standards. Events surrounding the reading,
such as his refusal of hospitality one night to a drunken Kerouac and Ginsberg, have
caused some critics to see Rexroth as merely a jealous, cranky, even “square,” holdover
from an earlier era [34]. Part of the motivation for this study is to subvert that
assumption and to propose, at least by inference, a revisionary reading of the 6 Gallery
reading’s cultural importance.

By the 1950's, Rexroth’s cultural vision included the contention that organized
religion had failed to provide a way out of cultural disintegration, being dominated by
either the claustrophobic sensibility described above, or by a shallow, compromised and
self-serving reaction to it; that philosophy had foundered upon the same epistemological
skepticism, losing its ability to speak to people about the practical problems of life in
meaningful terms; and that ideological politics had proven equally bankrupt on an even

more massive scale. For Rexroth in the post-war period, the only hope for a revival of

-19-

essential values and experience lay with poetry, and with a poetry that could build upon
what happened at the Six Gallery on the night of October 13, 1955. It would be a poetry
that was camble of invoking more than protest, and even more than prophecy; a poetry
that in its highest manifestations would also be the intense communication of an
integrated and fully conscious personality, talking to others who were becoming so.

In the subsequent chapters I attempt to elucidate the various vectors that fed into
Rexroth's vision of a revolutionary and integrative cultural renaissance. His advocacy of
"jazz poetry" readings revealed his hope for creating an avant-garde art form that would
be accessible to both the academy and the masses, while still promoting the values of the
alternative culture. His grand historical vision allowed him to see the flow of time in
terms of "spiritual epochs,” the waxing and waning of organic cultures. His sense of
place allowed him to imagine why San Francisco was the only possible place for this
poetry renaissance to occur in the post-war world. His religious anarchism fueled a
political vision that was not tied to twentieth century ideologies. And his relationship to
the Beat movement, the movement that became the central emblem of the San Francisco

renaissance, reveals the true scope of his radical vision.

-20-

INTRODUCTION NOTES

1.

9‘.“

7.
8
9.
10.
1 1.

12.
l3.

14.
15.
16.
17.
I8.

19.

20.

Some of the better studies on Rexroth are Linda Hamalian’s biography, which leaves a
bitter taste in the mouth on account of its detailing of Rexroth’s treatment of the women
in his life; Lee Bartlett’s early general study of Rexroth’s poetry; Donald Gutierrez’s
more recent analysis of the short poems; and Morgan Gibson’s Revolutionary Rexroth,
Poet of East- West Wisdom, which provides a good introduction to the philosophical
concerns of Rexroth’s work

Even historians of the San Francisco Renaissance have treated Rexroth in a cursory,
obligatory manner. The most outstanding example of this is Warren G. French’s The
San Francisco Renaissance, 1955-1960. French treats Rexroth as if he were a mere
nuisance to the larger cultural goals of the Beats.

In the December 12, 1962 edition of The Christian: Century responded to the editors’
request for a list of the 10 most influential books in his life. His list included The
Resewch Magnyicent by HG. Wells, Mutual Aid by Petr Kropotkin, Tao Te Ching, by
Lao-Tzu, Science and the Modern - World by Alfred North Whitehead, Paideia by
Werner Jaeger, The [had by Homer, Ethics by Aristotle, the writings of Frederich von
HugeL the poems of Tu F u, and the writings of Michel de Montaigne.

HG. Wells, The Research Magnificent, (New Yorlc The MacMillan Company, 1915),
5 1.

Linda Hamalian, A Life of Kenneth Rexroth, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 6.
Kenneth Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel, (Santa Barbara: Ross-Erikson, Inc.,
Publishers, 1982), 35-37.

Hamalian, 14.

. Ibid, 18.

Ibid, 39.

Ibid, 35-40.

Ibid, 44.

Ibid, 58-59.

Rexroth, Kenneth Rexroth: Selected Poems, (New York: New Directions Books, 1984),
7.

Ibid, 8.

Ibid, 8.

Ibid, 89.

Ibid, 10.

Some of the most disparate intellectuals turned to Spengler and Toynbee for insights that
led to creative breakthroughs. For example, Ludwig Wittgenstein was inspired by the
organicist approach of the historians to clarify his approach to the history of linguistics
(see Art Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (Penguin, 1991).

Rexroth’s 1931 letters to Zukovsky; Kenneth Rexroth Papers, ca 1925-1979.
(Collection 175). Department of Special Collections, University Research Library,
University of California, Los Angeles.

Quoted in Hamalian, 106.

-21-

21.

22.
23.
24.

25.

26.

27.
28.
. quoted in Hamalian, 149.
30.

31.

32.
33.
34.

Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-
Century, (Cambridge University Press, 1991 ). Davidson’s first chapter is “The Elegaic
Mode: Rhetoric and Poetics in the 19405.” He uses Rexroth as a key figure to argue that
poets could respond only with elegy to the devestations of World War H.

Rexroth, Selected Poems, 16-17.

From letter dated July 11, 1940 (UCLA Special Collections)

In a review of The Journal of John Woolman, collected in More Classics Revisited,
Rexroth interestingly links together the legacy of Woolrnan with a Buddhist ideal,
stating, “Nirvana originally seems to have meant ‘unrufiled,’ as the surface of a pool,
and those whose minds have achieved that vision of peace are unable to violate it by
violence or the exploitation of other living creatures. Conversely, the way to
contemplative calm is by the path of kindness and love and respect for the integrity of
other creatures.” The Quaker ideal of the contemplative community thus logically
entailed a rejection of all violence.

In an interview with John Tritica in American Pm (Fall 1989), Everson stated,
regarding Rexroth, “Politically, he put California on the map. He was the first one to
take the Western archetype and make an aesthetic movement out of it and organize
it...Kenneth hadthe political acumen inthe historical moment-together, he made it
believable so that people could rally around it, and come for miles to participate in it If
it hadn’t been for him, I don’t think there would have been a San Francisco Renaissance,
not anything like it was. He’s the one who attracted Ginsberg. He liberated Ginsberg,
you might say.”

Steven Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels and Hipsters,
1944-1960, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 200.

Quoted in Hamalian, 148.

Hamalian, 150.

On July 11, 1964 Rexroth led a taped discussion among other intellectuals, broadcast on
KPFK radio, entitled “The Artist and his Social And Personal Morality.” This
discussion revealed Rexroth to be somewhat hesitant about where he stood on the issue
of how art and morality were intertangled

In a January 14, 1961 review of Robert Dtmcan’s The Opening of the Field, Rexroth
places special emphasis on Duncan’s mature personalisrn and liveliness in contrast to
the poets of what he called the “reactionary generation”

Hamalian, 156.

Rexroth, More Classics Revisited, (New York: New Directions Books, 1989), 69-72.
Again, French is the best example, but even a more recent study like Louis Ellingham’s
and Kevin Killian’s Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco, makes jabs
atRexrothinordertoassert Spicer’s influence onthe scene.

-22-

CHAPTER 1: KENNETH REXROTH’S “POPULIST AVANT-GARDE: JAZZ,
EMERSON, AND CULTURAL RENEWAL IN THE POST-WORLD WAR II ERA

"AchatwecaHsacredhistoryatteststhatthebhthofapoetisthepdncipal
event in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the
arrivalofabrotherwhocanholdhimsteadytoau'utnuntilhehasmadeit
hisown Withwhatjoylbegintoreadapoem,whichIconfideinasan
inspiration! And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these
clouds and opaque airs in which I live, - opaque, though they seem
transparent, - and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my
relations. That will reconcile me to life, and renovate nature, to see trifles
animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing Life will no more be
a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they
maybediscernedfiomfoolsandsatans Thisday shallbebetterthanmy
birthday: then I became an animal; now I am invited into the science of the
real.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet")

For Kemreth Rexroth, San Francisco’s preeminent man of letters in the post-World
War II period, poetry was the lifeblood of the viable alternative culture he hoped to nurture
in the Bay area His early essays about the San Francisco scene, especially following the
Six Gallery reading at which Allen Ginsberg recited “Howl,” emphasized the place of
poetry in the process of cultural dissent and rejuvenation For example, in 1957’s
“Disengagment: TheArtoftheBeatGeneration,”anessayhewrotetoexplainwhatwas
lnppeninginSanFranciscotoanational audience, heclaimed,

“...poetry hasbecome anactual social force—somethingthat hasalways sounded

hitherto like a Utopian dream of the William Morris sort It is a very tluilling

experiencetohearanaudience ofmorethanthreehundredpeople standandcheer

and clap, as they invariably do at a reading by Allen Ginsberg, certainly a poet of
revolt if there ever was one.” [1]

It was significant that of all the art forms, poetry was the one that became identified
with San Francisco culture more than any other in the 1940’s and 50’s. There were several
painters in the Bay area at that time, including Clyfi‘ord Still, Richard Diebenkom and
Morris Graves, who were to attain international recognition. Musicians like Dave Beck,
along with a burgeoning theatrical movement, also helped to enrich the cultural mix. Jack
Kerouac was primarily a novelist, and late-comer Richard Brautigan wrote experimental
prose, but fiction was not the primary ambition ofmost ofthe literary artists who were part
oftheBayareacultural sceneinthemiddleofthecentury. Insteadpoetrysatatthe hub
ofcultural activity in San Francisco. it had a hold over the culture in that geographical area
thatwassimilartothepreeminenceofpoetryintheareaarordeoncord, Massachusettsin
the mid-nineteenth century, a time when American literature was first trying to assert itself
on the world stage. In the 1840’s, Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Bronson Alcott were conduits for a Emopean romanticism that prioritized "inspired" poetry
among the literary forms. Poetry was the voice of the gods, or of god-like men. It was the
elite art that would lead the consciousness of the new nation into self-recognition

ButinSananciscoonehmrdredyearslater,thereasonsforitspriorifizafionwere
more complex. First, it was the art form that could attract a working class culture possessing
limited time for cultural consumption Poetry was convenient for those who had to fit their
reading and writing around their jobs as carpenters and dockworkers. Second, the strong
Buddhist sub-culture in the area also had a bias towards the shorter, more meditative forms
of literary expression For many, the haiku was the ultimate form of literary expression

Thirdagroundswellofnewpoeticenergiesacrossthecountryinthepostwarperiodfed

-24.

into San Francisco through the direct and indirect influence of poets like Robert Duncan,
Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson and Frank O'Hara And finally, something
has to be said for the element of chance; that it might have been a cosmic coincidence for so
many good poets to converge upon one area at one time.

Yet the factor that may be overlooked isthat Kenneth Rexroth, drawing fiom his
experience of the previous thirty years, helped to inculcate, within his sphere of influence, a
vision of the poet as the mediator of new and integrative cultural ideals, ideals that could
restoreandbuildalivingcultme withinthe husk ofthe oldand dyingone ofthepast As
opposed to most of his confieres, he did not envision merely a new literary or artistic
culture, but rather an incipient new culture in the widest sense of the word, encompassing
entirely new ways of living. In his “San Francisco Letter” of 1957, Rexroth emphasized the
need for creative intellectuals, especially artists and poets, to take the lead in forming the
sensibility of the alternative culture, asserting that

“Noliteratureofthepasttwohtmdredyears is ofthe slightest importance miless itis

‘disaffiliated ’ Only our modern industrial and commercial civilimtion has

produced an elite which has consistently rejected all the reigning values of the

society...Capitalism cannot produce item within itself...any system of values which
is not in essence of itself. . . Artist, poet, physicist, astronomer, dancer, musician,
mathematician are captives stolen from an older time, a different kind of society, in

which, ultimately, they were the creators of all primary values.” [2, WOW, 58-59]

He nurtured this vision of a new culture by placing himself within the Emersonian
critical traditionbytestingthelimits ofthepoetryreadingasthe progenitorofanew
”populist avant-garde,” and by promoting a sense of poetry as the facilitator of religious
experience, or as that which worked within a culture to restore the values arising out of

direct interpersonal experience.

-25-

i

To be generous, American culture as a whole has always had an ambiguous
relationship with its poets. As shapers of cultural vision, poets, when not entirely ignored,
have been resisted to a much greater degree than have preachers, politicians, or more
recently, pundits. Most have simply accepted this state of affairs and have quietly gone
about their business, retaining hopes that someday their poems would be embraced by a
fervent cadre. Mass popularity has always seemed like a pipe dream for serious writers.
The greatest of American poets have indeed embraced their singularity and outsiderness to
an extraordinary degree. Think of Dickinson, Whitman to a certain extent, Eliot (who was
so outside he became British), and Robert Lowell (whose mental illness ironically helped to
establish his greatness as an "American” poet). On the other hand, there has been a strong
undercurrentinthehistory ofAmericanpoetry inwhichpoetsandcritics haveattemptedto
create an afiliation with the common people and the common elements of American culture
in a sort of populist urge. In this context think of Philip Freneau, Carl Sandburg, Whitman
again (he was large, and contained multitudes), the proletarian poets of the 1930s, and in a
special sense, the Beatnik poets ofthe late 19505 and early 19603.

In the way that Rexroth hoped the San Francisco Renaissance might mediate, or
transcend, the two tendencies descnhed above, borrowing from or condoning the strengths
ofeacnhemvealedhisafiinityforflreEmersoniannotionofflrepoetasthe spiritual
visionaryoftheculture. Inanerainwhichmenweretruly ”neversooftendeceived,”
Rexrothplacedhishopeinpoetryandthepoetryreadingforinitiatingandsustainingasort
of populist avant-garde, not only in the realm of literature, but embodied in a radically

-26-

integrated counter-culture. It would be a culture that could, through the medium of poetry,
sustain a perspective from which individuals would "see” and "comprehend" their true
relations. This is why he initially placed so much importance on the Six Gallery reading.

Rexroth was perhaps the only one of the participants to see the Six Gallery
reading as a potential point of "turning" in the culture, the catatalyst and harbinger of a
new cultural (and ”spiritual") epoch in which previous antipodes (authority and
anarchism, classicism and organicism, Orient and Occident) would coalesce around a
new consciousness of organic social realities. Though he has often been labelled (and
sometimes dismissed) as a poet of eroticism, Rexroth's role as cultural prophet and critic,
which will be stressed in this study, has been largely ignored It was Rexroth's essentially
historical viewpoint that led him to look for such catalysts as described above within the
flow of history, and for various reasons that will be explored, by the 1950's he saw any
new catalyst as necessarily revolving around the phenomenon of the poetry reading.

To Rexroth, all else had failed to accomplish any significant measure of cultural
renewal by the post-World War 11 period Both politicians and preachers had had their
chance, and while contributing certain fruitful aspects to American culture, had failed to
maintain and propogate truly sustaining and life-afiirrning values. Society-wide institutional
revolution on the Marxist, Leninist, Trotskyite, or socialist-utopian models had also revealed
theirseverepractical limitations withintheAmerican context; yetagainnotwithoutmaking
their important contributions to the ”science of the real."

WhatsetpoeuyapanforReraothwasthatheconsideredittobethemosthnense

mode of person-to-person communication invented by human beings, capable of producing

-27-

and supporting a heightened sense of responsibility between persons. As he wrote in his

disengagement essay,

No avant-garde American poet accepts the I. A. Richards-Valery thesis that a poem

is an end in itself, an anonymous machine for providing esthetic experiences. All

believe in poetry as communication, statement fiom one person to another. [3]

The new social atmosphere produced by the omnipresence of poetry would cut
through all ideologies, mystifications, and rigid theological principles. It would, Rexroth
also hoped, preserve a pervasive sense of "the tribe" among a society in dissolution In
“Back to the Sources of Literature,” he wrote,

"As in the days before the city and the alphabet, poetry has become once

again an art of direct communication, one person speaking or dinging

directly to others. Along with this change has come, in the words of the

poems themselves, a constant, relentless, thoroughgoing criticism of all the

values of industrial commercial civilimtion Poetry today is people poetry as

it was in tribal society and it performs the same function in a world-wide

cormter-culture. It is the most important single factor in the unity of that
counter-culttue and takes the place of ideologies and constitutions, even of

religious principles. " [4]

Rexroth was not inferring that counter-cultlual cohesion could be produced by
merely rallying around protest slogans in the form of poetry or "poetic" lyrics. In fact, he
recognized all too clearly how simple it was to co-opt and commercialize such blatant
rebellion The type of poetry he envisioned was a poeuy of implicit critique, a poetry that
was not necessarily outrageous on the surface (or only on the surface), but that, in arising
out of the poet's individual vision, posited alternative values grounded in a mature and
consistent sense of what natural, organic relationships required It would be a poetry in
whichthevisionissubsumedinthecrafiandthecraftisatthe service ofthe vision [5]

-28-

, It was not rebellion for the sake of rebellion that Rexroth sought, but rather an utter
disaffiliation fiom a culture that promoted alienation and artificial human relationships. This
disaffiliation was to be efi’ected through highly purposive, carefully constructed
communication fiom one person (the poet) to another (the receptive sensibility). The poetry
would be populist in its underlying democratic faith in the potentialities of the "common"
man or woman, and avant-garde in its implicit assumption that only formal experimentation
and freedom could express individual sensibility as formed within a modern environment
The ideal result was the attainment of the transformative "I-Thou" relationship described by
Jewish Hasidic thinker Martin Buber in his classic text of that title. Buber’s main thesis was
that the primary experience of being human involved overcoming reification of personality
and creativity in a love relationship. And, according to Buber, when reification is overcome,
it effects every other perspective one has towards reality. He wrote:

"Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons-The pmpose of

relation is the relation itself- touching the You For as soon as we touch a

You, we are touched by a breath of eternal life. Whoever stands in relation,

participates inanactuality; thatis, inabeingthatis neithermerelyapartof

him nor merely outside him. All actuality is an activity in which I participate

without being able to appropriate it. Where there is no participation, there is

no actuality. Where there is self-appropriation, there is no actuality. The

more directly the You is touched, the more perfect is the participation" [6]

RexrothwroteanextensiveessayonBuberin 1959 inwhichhestatedthatland
Thou was "one of the determinative books of [his] life." One of the goals of Rexroth’s essay
wasmdenythegroupingofBuberwiflrtheexistenfialistphilosophemwhowem sopopular
on college campuses at tint time. For Rexroth, Buber was not an existentialist, since he did

notsharetheirparticularfiameofmind

-29-

"For people who do not know the maximum state of insecurity bred in most
men caught in our disintegrating social fabric as in a thicket of fire, its
dilemmas, like the epistemological dilemma that bothered the British for
three centuries, simply do not exist. The dilemma does not exist for Buber."

[7]

Instead, Rexroth said that the Jewish philosopher was fully at home in the world, and
that he was really a communist (small "c"), not an existentialist According to Rexroth,
Buber did not believe that human beings could experience any sort of meaningful reality
while nurturing a solipsistic sense of self and withdrawing from the Other (people, culture,
social possibilities, etc). Yet neither was Buber advocating a sort of chic "togetherness.”
As Rexroth wrote, for Buber ’

"....the reciprocal response I and Thou is the only mode of realization of the

fullest potential of each party. The one realizes itself by realizing the other.

The ego is by definition the capacity to respond. It does not lie in some inner

recess of the person, but is ‘out there,’ it is built in the firllness of our

intercourse with others. We respondtoapersonwe reacttothings. True, a

great deal of our relations with other men is systems of reaction, but morality

.BtheanxykubflnufingrenxnuejbrnanxunrIhnmyfiuasanoflmrhunuur

being is treated as a thing he is dehumanized." [8]

For Rexroth, the sense oforganic reality that the poet must express in order to open
him or herself up to transformative reciprocity with others is only attained through what he
called the "religious experience." This, he explained, is not some esoteric state that is only
available to religious ascetics. In fact, exclusivist attitudes about ecstatic experience were
part of the romanticist trap embraced by certain mid-century literary circles, creating a
literary ideology of the poet as the existentialist hero of consciousness. Lionel Trilling's
essay on John Keats, "The Poet as Hero: John Keats in His Letters," was one ofthe seminal

terns ofthis ideology. According to this view, the true poet provides vatic utterances, but

.30-

only to a select audience that is capable of understanding the poet’s sense of his or her own

imaginative/prophetic powers.
As one interpreter of Rexroth put it, the religious experience is more truly a sense of

the "holiness of the real,” available to every human being through an imaginative leap and
prompted by a simple openness to experience, or the "You," that poetry is especially
equipped to convey, if not enact [9]. To Rexroth, ideologies, constitutions and theologies,
though usefirl at times to a certain extent, too often allowed one to indefinitely retreat from
an honest consideration, or even a recognition, of one's own particular human experience
among other persons and things. They rigidified relationship, instead of seeing it in terms of
the constant flow of interrelated perspectives. At the beginning of his poem "The Signature
of All Things," Rexroth attempted to show how this "I-Thou" openness to experience allows
the transformative to occur.

My head and shoulders, and my book
In the cool shade, and my body
Stretchedbatlringinthesunllie
Reading beside the waterfall -
Boehme's "Signature of All Things."
Through the deep July day the leaves
Of the laurel, all the colors

Of gold, spin down through the moving
Deep laurel shade all day. They float
On the mirrored sky and forest

For a while, and then, still slowly
Spimring, sink through the crystal deep
Of the pool to its leaf gold floor.

The saint saw the world as streaming

In the electrolysis of love.

I put him by and gaze through shade
Folded into shade of slender

Laurel trunks and leaves filled with sun
Thewrenbroodsinhermossdomednest
A newt struggles with a white moth

-31-

Drowning in the pool. The hawks scream,
Playing together on the ceiling

Of heaven. The long hours go by.

I think of those who have loved me,
Ofall the mountains I have climbed,
Ofalltheseaslhaveswumin.

The evil of the world sinks.

My own sin and trouble fall away
Like Christian's btmdle, and I watch
My forty summers fall like falling
Leaves and falling water held
Eternally in summer air. [10]

Rexroth is not conveying here a description of an epiphany. Instead, it is meant to
be a reflection of the poet’s own developing sensibility to the reality that surrormds him. It
is a presentation, and revelation, of his own personality; not a detached analysis of it, which
characterized too much contemporary poetry.

The great Mexican modernist, Octavio Paz, once formulated the dichotomy between
natural relationship and codified viewpoints in terms of what he called the religous word
and the poetic word. The religious word is an interpretation of experience which arises out
of, and is thus dependent upon, the poetic word The poetic word is that which is essentially
a revelation of experience, or of the real. When the religious word is allowed to be taken as
self-sustaining and of a higher order than that which gave it birth, a reification of principles
takes place and space is created for rigid ideologies, constitutions and theologies to be born
A spurious and potentially oppressive abstraction then takes precedence over human
realities in the interconnected political, religious and economic spheres [11].

The substance of Rexroth's sensibility, a sensibility forged of equal parts religious

mysticism and political anarchism, was his absolute conscious resistance to the growth of

-32-

these artificial abstractions in culture. And - in what seems like an amazing conjunction
within an American context — he believed that poetry, for some of the reasons listed above,
provided the most direct resistance to them in the post-war period Poetry was that which
could, by continuous infusion within the culture, sustain valms, develop sensrhilities, and
maintain the vision of meaningful human relationships apart from artificial
institutionalization and codification. And herein lies Rexroth's affinity for the Emersonian
idea of the Poet

Emerson's "Poet" was also the agent of a type of religious anarchism, even if
Emerson didn‘t use that particular term. For example, the "Divinity School Address" was, in
essence,acall forministerstobecomePoetsifflreywantedtobecometrueministersofthe
gospel, a call which the good doctors of Harvard rightly recognized as dangerous to their
hegemony. In his well-known, but suprisingly much mismderstood distinction between the
mystic and the poet, Emerson's describes the mystic characterizes him in terms largely
synonomous with Paz’s description of the theologian who takes a private (or privied)
revelation to be universally and etermlly true, and thus lives, in a spiritual sense, continually
in the past

"The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze...Here is the

difi’erencebetwixtthepoetandthemystic,thatthe lastnails asymbol toone

sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and

false...Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual
symbol for an universal one." [12]

Thus, translating Emerson into Marxist terms, mysticism is never far from
mystification The poet is distinguished by his continual a'ccessrhility to what the "symbols"

ofmtmemightconveymhimunthintheshifiingcrmentsofumeandcheumsmpce.

-33-

Symbol, in this sense, becomes opposed to principle, or law, which in the western cultural
tradition has usually been assumed to be the sustainer of a meaningful, enlightened existence
over time.

In the end, whatever "symbols" are for Emerson, they are indivisible from
experienceitselfioperatingasintense participantsandshapersinallthatcanbecalled
reality. They are living, and thus organic, terms of existence; never static, in which case
they would become mere encrustations upon whatever truths might be taken from them and
expressed They are also upsetting to all presumptive and reifying orderings of human
experience. I believe this is what Emerson was alluding to when he wrote:

"The history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error consisted in
making the symbol too stark and solid, and, at last, nothing but an excess of

the organ oflanguage." [13]

The emergence of the Poet is thus the essential aspect of "sacred history" in its
afiirmation of sensibility over human convention Convention always refers back to a
certain understanding of past conditions and experiences, but may be, and usually is,
insufiicient to the varied demands of the present hour. It is only a temporary mechanism for
social adhesion which easily gives a false sense of personal and cultural security, while
ultimately creating disintegrative conditions due to its increasing inapplicability. The true
poet, according to Emerson, acts to realign each generation with its own peculiar experience.

"Thepoethasanewthought: hehasawholenewexperiencetormfold; he

willtellushowitwaswithhim,andallmenwillbethericherinhisfortune.

For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the

world seems always waiting for its poet" [14]

Such a formulation posits sensibility, rather than convention, as the basis for a

culture's continuity. Sensrhility is the opposite, or alternative to, convention in that it

-34-

requires a continual attention to the organic realities of the present time, which are only
understood within the context the past provides, and are only enlivened by an energetic, and
potentially radical, hope for the future. In his somewhat "wild" speaking, the poet may
initially create the impression of a dangerous radicality, but if he has spoken truly, i.e., has
correctly evoked the organic realities and nwds of the present, he will enter into that
transformative relationship with his audience in which they enact not only a type of cultural
unity, but also an existential unity within themselves as individuals - a unity of action and
vision

"He is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and by his art, but with

this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men sooner or later.

For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression In love, in art, in

avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret.

The man is only halfhimself, the other halfis his expression" _ [15]

The poet performs an integrative fimction in society, then, not by falling back upon
conventions, but by trusting in his sensibility to govern both himself, and through his
expression, raise others up to self-govemance. Hence, the political function of the poet in an
Emersonian sense, a sense that found strong echoes in Rexroth

t

”The beauty of the fable proves the importance of the sense; to the poet, and
to all others; or, ifyou please, every man is so far a poet as to be susceptible
of these enchantrnents of nature. " (The Poet)

Mid-nineteenth century American Transcendentalism has primarily been viewed as
a literary and philosophical phenomenon. The Transcendentalists’ broad cultural concerns,
which constituted their commonality, have accordingly been largely overlooked Yet, as

especially seen in Emerson, they were men and women who agonized over the fate of their

-35-

culture in the wake of increasing industrialization and technologimtion They worried
incessantly about what would later be called alienation, or the existential separation they felt
had creeped into relationships between people, nature, and the divine. Indeed, without these
concerns, their movement makes little sense.

Emerson centered, as Rexroth would later do likewise, on the poet, or poetry, as the
prime agent or agency by which the culture might be reinvigorated towards an integrated
condition, defined as that condition in which each member of society is contributing towards
the enrichment of the whole through free and intrinsically rewarding labor that is consonant
with his or her personal needs and inclinations.

This integrated condition is undergirt by the intense appropriation of certain
common ideals functioning organically to, first, heal divisions within the individual
concerning belief and practice, word and deed, and then in the arena of social relations.
Such an organic, integrative view of culture goes beyond simple anarchism in several ways.
Itimpliesthenecessityofaspeclrumofidealstobemanifestedineveryareaofculture,and
it assumes that individual fieedom is not an end in itself, but instead a prerequisite for the
attainment of "natural" and mutually sustaining human relationships. One primary
metaphor for this might be that of the marriage of lovers, a metaphor used extensively by
Rexroth in his poetry.

Perlnps not surprisingly, Rexroth expressed himself most strongly regarding the
idealofmarriagewhenhisownmaniageswerenotattheirsuongestasifhewerecalling
backthe ideal in orderto give himselfhope in the midst ofdissolution, a situation that
mirrored his relationship to the culture as a whole. "She Is Away" shows very clearly his

-36-

idealism towards marriage, as a union of fiee individuals resulting in the awakening to a
integral truth.

All night I lay awake beside you,

Leaning on my elbow, watching your
Sleeping face, that face whose purity

Never ceases to astonish me.

I could not sleep. But I did not want

Sleep nor miss it. Against my body,

Your body lay like a warm soft star.

How many nights I have waked and watched
You, in how many places. Who knows?
This night might be the last one of all.
Asonsomanynights,oncemorel

Drank fiom your sleeping flesh the deep still
Communion I am not always strong

Enough to take fi'om you waking, the peace of love.
Foggy lights moved over the ceiling .
Ofourroom, soliketherooms omence
And Italy, rooms of honeymoon,

And gave your face an ever changing
Smeh, the secret communication

Of untellable love. I knew then,

As your secret spoke, my secret self,

The blind bird, hardly visrble in

An endless web oflies. And I knew
Thewebtoo,itsevery knotandstrand,

The hidden crippled bird, the terrible web.
Towards the end of night, as trucks rumbled
Inthe streets, youstined, cuddledtome,
And spoke my name. Your voice was the voice
Ofagirlwhohadneverknownloss

Of love, betrayal, mistrust, or lie.
Andlateryouturnedagainandclutched

My handandpressed ittoyourbody.

Now I know surely and forever,

However much I have blotted our

Waking love, its memory is still

There. And I know the web, the net,

The blind and crippled bird For then, for
Onebriefinstantitwasnotblind, nor
Trapped, nor crippled For one heart beat the
Heart was free and moved itself. 0 love,

-37-

I who am lost and damned with words,

Whose words are a business and an art,

I have no words. These words, this poem, this
Is all confusion and ignorance.

But I know that coached by your sweet heart,
Myheartbeatonefreebeatandsent

Through all my flesh the blood oftruth [l6]

Onemightinterpretthelastpartofthispoemtobeirnplyingthatpoetryisuseless
for creating the fieedom and love that might join together to create a mutually sustaining
organic truth. Yet such an interpretation begs the question of why the poem was written in
the first place. The poem itself does not create the merging of love and freedom, but
communicates it in terms of personal experience. The poem fwds vision. It crystalizes one
perspective on the ever-changing face of the relationship. It provides a map of the
transcendent by synthesizing the experience into its essential elements and revelations. It
also reinforces the truth that relationships of whatever sort are shaped by negotiations
between inward selves and masks.

The individual must, though, arise out of the contemplation of his lover (the beatific
vision) at a certain point and recognize his enduring responsibility to the vision One aspect
ofthe poet's responsrblity is to communicate it to others, that they might find
correspondences within their own experience and thus grow in their sensibility to how their
experiences create organic values within their lives. In other words, the poet cannot just
create. He or she must communicate.

at

AsLawrence FerlinghettihaspointedOtmtheatmosphereengenderedbytheSix
Galleryreadingrestoredthe vocalaspectofpoetrytotheculture [17]. ButRexroththought

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that this development could be taken even further. Indeed, it was necessary to take it as far
as possible away from the dominant model, since the poetry of the established literary
quarterlies had taken on an unassimilable academicism in the post-war period that was
rejected not only by the poets of the San Francisco renaissance, but by American culture as a
whole. Poetry in its legitimized forms had become something that was unattractive to even
the generally educated populace by the 1950's.

In the years immediately following the Six Gallery reading, Rexroth poured his
energies into the attempt to legitimize the combination of jazz and poetry into a rigorous,
hybrid art form. He was driven by the hope that it would be the primary aesthetic
contribution of the San Francisco renaissance to the history of art. He also felt that it was a
logical progression in the history of the arts and the organic artistic expression of a new
society. He believed it was a form that allowed both jazz, as the most indigenous of
American art forms, and poetry, as intrinsically the most intense mode of personal
communication, to reach their respective heights of cultural significance [18].

But even more importantly for Rexroth, it was potentially the art form in which
poetry, possessing the attributes listed above, could become available to a larger audience
than ever before, and do the deep work of cultural integration he believed it was equipped to
do.

1958 was a pivotal year in the history of this project The initial commotion
surroundingthebeats-especiallyGinsberg KerouacandFerlinghetti—wasreaching its
apex, with most literary academics situating themselves within an evolving spectrum of
negative responses. AnythingnewcomingoutofSanFranciscowasbormdtobe

-39-

categorized, and thus blithely dismissed, as part of the Beat phenomenon, signifiying its lack
of refinement and discipline.

Yet in that year Rexroth decided to undertake a cross-country trip that was primarily
devoted to the propagation of what he would call "jazz poetry." Undoubtedly his escalating
marital problems had something to do with his decision to leave the Bay area at that time,
but as a serious intellectual in his early fifties he also wanted to take the opportunity to
distance his own project fiom the more spurious aspects of the Beat movement He had not
yet proclaimed his own disaffiliation from the Beats, but this trip was a sign that he was
moving in that direction. ‘

Rexroth spent three weeks in St Louis, giving readings at the Crystal Palace that
were very well-received by primarily bohemian crowds. Then he went on to New York to
read at the Five Spot, make the rounds of a few television interview shows, and meet up
with poets Louise Bogan and John Ciardi, with whom he got along very well. Before
returning to San Francisco, he rounded out his trip with his only college appearances,
readings at Bard and Dartmouth.

Remothwasactuaflyeagertopresemhisjazzpoeuytoacademiccmwdsinpan
becausehe was becoming sick ofthe "infatuation withthehipster" that was startingto
dominate the club scene, but also because he felt he was doing something important in the
history of culture, something that should have been recognized by academics as such

Infactfarfiom concedingthatthebroadergroundswell ofjazzpoetry performances
had its foundation in ignorance and artistic sloth, he attempted to present it as a validly
unique and aesthetically rigorous art form that called for a high degree of understanding and

innovative skill in both literature and music. It was a tremendous challenge, though, to
convince the country that jazz poetry was not merely another in a long line of post-World
War II cultural fads. Thus, while he was in New York he contributed an article to The
Nation, subsequently republished in Esquire, detailing his theoretical justifications for the
form, while also touching on his worries and hopes for it

At the beginning of the essay, Rexroth acknowledged the possibility of jazz poetry
ironing into a fad, but confidently asserted that it "has permanent value or I would not have
undertaken it" He then outlined the tradition of which he believed jazz poetry was an
extension, connecting it to the "talking blues" of African-American folk song, the cafe
chantat audition in France, and to certain sermon techniques found in "store front churches
and Negro revival meetings." [19]

More particularly, he recalled his and Langston Hughes' recitations of poetry to jazz
in Chicago in the 1920's, and the efforts of Kenneth Patchen, Jack Spicer, Lawrence Lipton
and Clmrlie Mingus within the form from the mid-1940's onward His judgment upon these
nw-contemporary manifestations of jazz poetry was that either the music or the texts
seemed to predominate, thus causing the performances to fall short of his integrative ideal.

Then he went on to explain exactly whatjazz poetry was. His basic definition was
that "it is the reciting of suitable poetry with the music of a jazz band, usually small and
comparatively quiet" He takes care to differentiate it from mere recitation to "backgrormd"
music, explaining that

"the voice is integrally wedded to the music and, although it does not sing

notes, is treated as another instrument, with its own solos and ensemble
passages, and with solo and ensemble work by the band alone. It comes and

-41-

goes, following the logic of the presentation, just like a saxaphone or a
piano." [20]

He then began to answer the logical question as to why jazz and poetry should be
combined in the first place. What was the point? And how were they better together than
apart?

He admitted that jazz and vocalization were usually uneasy bedfellows, and that
"jazz vocalists, especially white vocalists and especially in the idiom of the most advanced
jazz, are not very common" He singled out Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald for their
accomplishments in the ballad and popular forms, but while he did not consider their efforts
trivial, he distinguished them from "the musical world of modern jazz" on account of their
lack of intellectual content and their "limited emotional honesty." "The best jazz,"
Rexroth asserted, "is above all characterized by its absolute emotional honesty" (italics
mine), which is followed by the implication that, just as sentimental lyricists had given
words to popular ballads, serious poets were equipped to give jazz "a richer verbal content."
Moreover, he argued that poetry "reinforces and expands its [modern jazz's] musical
meaning and, at the same time, provides material ofthe greatest flexibility." [21]

Rexroth's assumption throughout the essay is that neither poetry nor jazz were
compromisedasseriousartformswhentheywereintegrated Thereisnolaxnessnorlack
of structure involved, and the improvisation is fiee only to the extent that the musicians and
poetsunderstoodhowto exploitthe inherentformal properties oftheirart Such anattitude
puthimatodds witheertainthen-cmrentstancestowardsjazz, though, andRexrothmay
have been referring to Jack Kerouac's romanticimtion of the Afiican-American jazz

musicianinOntheRoadwhenhewrote,

-42-

"I would like to mention that jazz, contrary to lay opinion, is not just

spontaneously ‘blown' out of the musicians' heads. Behind even the freest

improvisation lies a fund of accepted patterns, chord changes, riffs, melodic

figures, variations of tempo and dynamics, all understood by the musicians."

[22]

Rexroth saw ignorance and pretentiousness as the primary dangers to the
development of the new art form, since those who were not "serious musicians and poets
who mean business" only furthered its faddist elements and cast doubt on the artistic

integrity of the form.

Yet Rexroth did not hope to establish just another elite art form. On the contrary, he
believed that in skillqu combination, both the jazz and the poetry would be more accessible,
attracting a wider public than had ever before paid attention to them. It would be a synthesis
not only of two different art forms, but a form potentially capable of transcending the
dichotomy between "high" and "low" artistic expression in American culture. At this point
in the essay, Rexroth broached his central thesis regarding jazz poetry.

"I think that it is a development of considerable potential significance for
bothjazzandpoetry. Itreachesanaudiencemanytimesaslargeasthat
commonly reached by poetry, and an audience free of some of the serious
vices of the typical poetry lover. It returns poetry to music and to public
entertainmentas itwasinthedays ofHomerorthe troubadors. It forces
poetrytodeal with aspects oflife which ithastenwdtoavoidintherecent
past It demands of poetry something of a public surface - meanings which
can be grasped by ordinary people - just as the plays of Shakespeare had
something for both the pit and the intellectuals in Elizabethan times, and still
have today. And, as I have said, it gives jazz a flexible verbal content, an
adjunct which matches the seriousness and artistic integrity of the music."
[23]

lnthelinernotestoanalbumherecordedattheBlackhawkinSanFrancisco,
Remthespeciaflyemplmsizedhowhehopedjanpoeflywouldefi’eaamvemalmdre
tendency of poetry to become the cloistered preserve of academics and intellectuals, a

-43-

situation in which it could not become a mode of dialogue between normal, interested
persons. He plainly stated that

"...the combination of poetry and jazz, with the poet reciting, gives the poet a

new kind of audience. Not necessarily a bigger one [though he stressed the

probability of this in the other essay], but a more normal one - ordinary

people out for the evening, looking for civilized entertainment. It takes the

poet out of the bookish academic world and forces him to compete with

‘acrobats, trained dogs, and Singer’s Midgets' as they used to say in the days

of vaudeville." [24]

Rexroth always stuck to his guns in proclaiming that Allen Ginsberg's declamation
of "Howl" in October of 1955 was the final death knell for the English baroque literary
tradition, and all the useless cultural baggage attached to it And when, in the late 1960's, he
took a position on the English faculty at the University of Califomia-Santa Barbara, he was
merciless in his derision of those professors who were still enthralled to that tradition

Poetry would liveon by self-consciously enacting its function within the "great turn"
of culture that Rexroth believed was occturing in the post-war world, in which "the
meanings of life change and human relationships undergo far-reaching reorganimtion" [25]
Even a poet and critic like John Crowe Ransom had acknowledged, in the mid-1920's, that
poetryasitwasthenbeingpracticedhadreachedthe endoftheroad Atatimewhen
modernism was still near its zenith, Ransom observed that it ironically seemed to be killing
poetry "because too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet" [26] In other
words, the modernist movement's self-conscious extensions of itself were causing it to, in

fact, over-extend itself, going beyond what poetry, as an art form possessing certain

constitutive limits, was able to bear.

Certain groups of poets that would inevitably be labelled "post-modernist," such as
those who latched on to Charles Olson's "projective" poetics, or those of the "New York
School," extended the modernist experiment in ways that allowed for new content, or
stances of attention, but they produced poetries that were not any more social in their
implications than those poems of the modernist masters. Rexroth's ambitions for poetry
emphasized the social significance and meaning of the Emersonian ideal of poetic vocation,
rather than the individualist mental heroics it could also encourage.

But if poetry were to become a social force without degenerating into ideological
posturing, it would have to be able to present itself as a public, and potentially communal,
experience. It would also have to do so without relinquishing any of the qualities that were
peculiar to it as poetry. Additionally, it would have to stand outside the manipulative
strategies of most popular art forms. Only then could it become the manifestation of a truly
“populist avant-garde.”

ForRerdotltallofthiswastobebestfirlfilledintheweddingofpoetryandjazz.

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NOTES

1. Kenneth Rexroth, “Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation,” in World Outside
the Window: The Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth, (New York: New Directions Books,
1987), 54-55.
2. Rexroth, “San Francisco Letter,” in World Outside the Window, 58-59.
3. Rexroth, “Disengagement.”, 54.
4. Kenneth Rexroth, "Back to the Sources of Literature," The Alternative Society: Essays
fiom the Other World (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 148. '
5. Rexroth, “Poetry, Regeneration, and DH Lawrence,” in World Outside the Window, 19.
6. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1970), 112-113.
Rexroth, "The Hasidisrn of Martin Buber," in World Outside the Window, 77,82.
Ibid, 93.
This is a major theme of Donald Gutierrez’s fine study, “The Holiness of the Real The
Short Verse of Kenneth Rexroth (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1996).
10. Rexroth, The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New
Directions, 1966), 177.
11. Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973),
13 1 -132.
12. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Poet," Essays: First and Second Series (Vintage
Books: The Library of America,1990), 233.
13. Ibid, 234.
14. Ibid, 220.
15. Ibid, 218.
16. Rexroth, The Collected Shorter Poems, 228-229.
17. “Note on Poetry in San Francisco,” in Casebook on the Beat, Thomas Parkinson, ed.
(Thomas Y. Crowell, 1961), 124.
18. Rexroth, “Jazz Poetry,” World Outside the Window, 71.
19. Ibid, 68.
20. Ibid, 69.
21. Ibid, 69.
22. Ibid, 70.
23. Ibid, 71.
24. Barry Wallenstein, “Poetry and Jazz: A Twentieth-Century Wedding,” Black American
Literature Forum, Vol.25, No. 3, (Fall 1991), 609.
25. Rexroth, “Back to the Sources of Literature,” The Alternative Society, 147.
26. John Crowe Ransom, Selected Essays of John Crowe Ransom, T.D. Young and
John Hindle, eds. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984),
27.

99°.“

CHAPTER 2 — THE POETICS OF HISTORY: SOME INFLUENCES ON
KENNETH REXROTH'S HISTORICAL VIEW OF CULTURE

There are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an
imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable. New ideas
generate everywhere, seeking to force their way into the light, to find an
application in life; everywhere they are opposed by the inertia of those
whose interest it is to maintain the old order; they suffocate in the stifling
atmosphere of prej udice and traditions. The accepted ideas of the
constitution of the State, of the laws of social equilibrium, of the political
and economic interrelationships of citizens, can hold out no longer
against the implacable criticism which is daily undermining them
whenever occasion arises, -- in drawing room as in cabaret, in the
writings of philosophers as in daily conversation. Political, economic and
social institutions are crumbling; the social structure, having become
uninhabitable, is hindering, even preventing the development of the seeds
which are being propagated within its damaged walls and being brought
forth around them... The need for a new life becomes apparent."

(Petr Kropotkin, "The Spirit of Revolt")

"Times came to the point where his radical nature and radical program
had their historical moment. I don 't think we would have heard too much
of Kenneth if that hadn 't happened " (William Everson)

By 1955, Kenneth Rexroth knew that any hope for a revolution in the social
structure had to be nourished from broader views of history and culture than his 19305
generation had possessed The dropping of the, A-Bomb, followed by the escalation of
the Cold War, showed him that the values of Western culture were now entirely oriented
towards violence and mutual destruction. If a new culture, with new values, could not
arise out of this civilization of death, the end of history was immanent. Yet, even while

recognizing the ways in which Western culture endorsed life-threatening values in every

-47-

realm of hmnan activity, he was indeed hopeful about the possibilities for the organic
renewal of human, even humane, culture.

In the post-war period, San Francisco became one mecca for sensitive young
people who wanted to explore alternative life-styles. For instance, Michael McClure had
come to San Francisco from Nebraska in the early 1950's, hoping, like Rexroth twenty-
five years earlier, to find an agreeable bohemian atmosphere. And thanks in part to
Rexroth's influence in the area, McClure was successfirl in discovering this atrnoshphere
in the North Beach section of the city. He later remembered,

"It was as if North Beach had a kind of dome over it. There you could

mix with the old bohemians and the old anarchists and the young kids

wearing sandals and growing beards for the first time. There would be

little bars where you could sip wine and see people writing poems and

playing chess and talking mysteriously about peyote. A touch of the

anarchist, of the philosopher, a kind of romance of narrow streets leading
into Chinatown - all that was North Beach." [1]

This quote from McClure also hints at the meeting of old and new, practical and
spiritual, wild and civilized that was going on in San Francisco at the time, and of which
the Six Gallery reading would be emblematic. It was an event that brought a measure of
definition to the post-war cultural flux

Rexroth himself was reduced to tears by Allen Ginsberg’s reading of “Howl” on
that October night in 1955. Though he had been conducting, or participating in, poetry
readings that were tied to political causes since the 1930s, he had never experienced a
reading in which the political, social and cultural implications were so dramatic and clear
(at least to him). He saw it as a sign of hope on a bleak twentieth century horizon, he

heard it as a beacon of spiritual vision within a culture of advanced alienation In the

-43-

interaction between poet and audience, he also saw the potential rebirth of what was most
relevant to him in the traditions of world religions - the experience of organic
community within a contemplative nexus, or what he usually just called "the religious
experience."

The precise dynamics of group experience that occurred at the Six Gallery in
1955 were not entirely unprecedented in the history of American culture, though. A close
analogue to what Watson describes would be the popular religious revivals of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast to the planned and highly organized
revival services that characterize twentieth century popular religion, the most marked
feature of the earlier revivals, at least until Charles Finney's peculiar standardization of
them, was the surprising nature of their manifestations, especially to'those who stumbled
into them without having any particular expectations. They were planned, but not
choreographed There were expectations, but of what was unclear.

Many participants in the earlier religious revivals also remarked in various ways
that a tremendous clarification of "reality" resulted from their experience. Jonathan
Edwards alludes to this in a 1735 letter to Benjamin Colman, pastor of the Brattle Street
Church in Boston

"It was very wonderful to see after what manner persons' affections were

sometimes moved and wrought upon, when God did suddenly open their

eyes and let into their minds a sense of his grace, and the fullness of Christ

and his readiness to save; who before were broken with apprehensions of

divinewmfltandsmkasintoanabysswithasenseofguilt, whichthey

were ready to think was beyond the mercy of God. Their joyful surprise

has caused their hearts as it were to leap; tears issuing like a flood,

intermingled with their joy; and sometimes they have not been able to

forbear expressing with a loud voice their great admiration, and sometimes
ready to faint.

-49-

"The converting influences of God's Spirit very commonly bring an
extraordinary conviction of the reality and certainy of the great things of
religion. They have that sight and taste of the divinity and divine
excellency of the things of the Gospel, that is more to convince them than
reading of hundreds of volumes of arguments without it. It seems to me,
in many instances amongst us, they have at such times been as far from
doubting of the truth of them, as from doubting whether there be a sun,
when their eyes behold it in a clear hemisphere." [2]

In both the revivals, and the central energy represented by the Six Gallery
reading, a potent combination of forces: economic, social, environmental, historical,
intellectual, psychological, and [possibly] spiritual converged to create a combustible
group dynamics that had revolutionary overtones and, in some cases, eschatological
meaning for the participants. Time seemed to be swinging on a hinge, in which "old
things were passing away, behold, all things are become new."

Similarly, Kenneth Rexroth saw post-World War 11 America as experiencing
something much more than an ordinary generational crisis. He believed, to a greater
extent than nearly any other intellectual of the era, that it was experiencing a catalyzing
eschatological moment in the history of its culture. Over and over again in his essays and
addresses he described the disjunction as nothing less than an attempt by the young to
usher in civilization on an entirely new basis, not merely through attitudes and acts of
rebellion, but through a complete disaffiliation from the values and accompanying norms
of a war culture, arising from a new sense of reality that left no room for wavering.

Thus, the hopefulness of Rexroth's cultural vision was based on a view of history
that was neither utopian nor progressive. Neither did he see the horrors of the post-war

world as revealing history to be an abstract force propelling events along a doomed path.

-50-

All such views were tied too strongly to contemporary ideologies for him to give them
much creedance.

Instead, his view of history was an outgrowth of his general organic view of
reality. Societies were either living or dying, as they had been since primitive times. The
direction of their development was internally determined, not thrust upon them by
abstractions such as God, spirit, or human nature. In other words, they created their own
teleologies. Sometimes the vitality of a society was determined by the decisions of
influential individuals, but on a deeper level a society was healthy if its members were
living lives that were an integration of action and contemplation, work and prayer. A
society was diseased if its members felt disconnected from one another by forces that
originated outside of any sort of responsible love relationship. War was such a force, and
world war signalled the general disease of world culture on all fronts.

Yet the possibilties for the emergence of a new society were inherent in the basic
human desire for what Rexroth called "interpersonal communication" and for what the
Buddhists call sunyata, or emptiness of self, acquired in the simple recognition of one's
organic relationship to the Other. Although the outward forms of historical cultures may
have been different, the underlying interpersonal dynamics creating the possibilties for
health or disease were constant, a part of the human condition One of the primary
motivations for studying history, then, was to discover the varied ways in which societies
maintained their organic health in the face of difi’ering environmental circumstances, and
to become more aware of the consequences of dehumanization as a cultural

characteristic.

.5].

Such a view of history caused Rexroth to celebrate works of historical scholarship
that perhaps would not have been much remarked upon in a radical literary environment
otherwise. His praise for Joseph Needham's massive Science and Civilization in China
revealed a distancing of himself from Western attitudes towards scientific progress and
the meaning of technology. He believed that Needham described an historical society
that was integrative in a sense that most Westerners would have had difficulty
recognizing. He writes,

"This book is about what the Chinese did, rather than about what they
thought...Cultures are different. People do think differently. For seven
hundred pages we can watch Chinese locksmiths, wheelwrights, harness
makers, well drillers, pump makers, millwrights, clock makers, the
designers of mechanical toys, especially flying toys, kites and balloons, all
meet their problems and solve them in characteristic fashion, subtly, but
obviously different fiom the ways we have tackled them in the west. As
we watch Chinese civilization - not an abstraction, but living Chinese

individuals - use brains and muscles to cope with the land of China, the

relation of work and the most remote speculation is revealed, and so

simply and undogmatically. There is a unity of mind and practice that

binds together Confucianism, Taoism, Chinese Buddhism, and Chinese

ways of using water, wind and horse power.” [3]

In such cultures, religion does not have a practical value. It is manifested in, and
expands upon, practical values, thereby deepening its core meditative function. Religion
only becomes a historical problem when it is an abstract force not organically connected
to the daily life and struggles of the people. Thus, by its very nature as an encapsulation
of a view of life, religion can either be the primary locus of healthy values, or the prime
disintegrative force in a culture's historical demise. In either case, religion is a central

metaphor, even it template, for revealing the culture as a whole.

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Although Needham turned himself into a historian, by training and profession he
was a biologist. His primary research involved finding a union of the areas of
biochemistry and morphogenesis, which involved solving "the central problem of
developmental biology, that of form and pattern." He focused on discovering the
chemical nature of the "organizer," that agency within organic forms that regulated their
developmental process. His findings caused him to remain "that structure and function,
form and chemical composition, were inseparable and could be dealt with experimentally
without the old dichotomies." [4]

The old dichotomies may have conformed to certain long-bred tendencies in the
structure of human logic, but were insufficient to explain the deeper realities of process.
In transposing these terms into the study of cultures, as Needham was fully inclined to
do, religion, as defined above, could be seen as the "organizer" of a culture.

Only historical views that took into account a culture's susceptibility to be being
understood through organic metaphors, and that were willing to view them as integrated
(or potentially integrated) processes meant anything to Rexroth. Specialized studies that
traced the fall of Rome to the machinations of a few greedy Senators were simply
unrealistic. Historians of "unbridled expansiveness" (Needham review) attracted him
most, because even if they were wrong, their attempts to capture the reality of cultures as
organic structures showed a recognition that this was where the real problems lay, as well
as the real possibilities for the future. Finally, such historians as I will now turn to saw
history as prophecy -not as determinative, but as suggestive for what could be

realistically hoped for. For Rexroth, who scattered their names throughout his writings,

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they provided a basic historical justification for the emergence of a healthy alternative

culture.

SPENGLER AND TOYNBEE ON THE ECLIPSE OF CULTURE

The German Oswald Spengler and the Englishman Arnold Toynbee represented
in the twentieth century the apparent culmination of a long historiographical tradition. As
epic historians of culture they are perhaps better known for their ambitions rather than
their accomplishments, yet they were still part of a line that stretched back to Thucydides
and Herodotus. Each participant in this line, whether it has been Gibbon, Hegel, or even
Francis Parkman, has conceived of their place in time as having reached an apex, or at
least a very crucial determinative point, in the development of human culture. Irnplicitly
or not, to highlight this juncture of history and fate was the primary motive behind their
mlects.

I say that Spengler and Toynbee represented an apparent culmination of this
tradition because, unlike most of the others, they wrote not about the resources within
Western culture that were developed through a time of crisis and opportunity, but about
the eclipse of the culture itself. In their studies they provided analyses of history that
were diacritical in their underlying assumption of the need for Western culture's absolute

transformation into a new society based on new values and new heroic possrhilities.

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As historians, they were not linear or progressive in any conventional sense.

They assumed that they were writing for an audience that was disillusioned with millenial
promises. Instead, they saw history as a function of "the waxing and waning of organic"
civilizations, people-groups not necessarily defined by nation or language but by
underlying assumptions, values, and world views. They both owed a great debt to Hegel
in their conceptions of a non-materialistic impetus to long-term change, and both, like
Wittgenstein, became increasingly mystical in their outlooks as they grew older.

Not surprisingly, more conventional historians have taken them to task for playing
fast and loose with certain historical facts, but whether fastidiousness alone would
undercut their theses is questionable. Their methods were attempts to uphold intuitions
that both possessed regarding the precariousness of civilization in the West in the
twentieth century, and while their conclusions may often have been questionable, their
intuitions struck a chord with many post-World War H writers, intellectuals and artists.

It is also pretty safe to say that neither would have become very famous had not
two world wars focused attention on the issues they were concerned with. Both began
writing their massive studies under the waning smoke of the first war, and events as they
played out, from the Depression to the concentration camps to the shock of the atomic
bomb, seemed to confirm their contentions that a great cataclysmic shift was taking place
in the history of civilizations. For those who had not become thoroughly skeptical
towards grand systematizations of history, including all who were too young to be

disgruntled Communists, Spengler and Toynbee were looked to for prescriptions

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concerning the future. In fact, it was in this role of historian-as-prophet that they
acquired much of their allure.

The novelist William Burroughs was probably the most famous counter-cultural
proponent of Spengler in the post-war period (Toynbee was too Christian, too British,
and perhaps too pretentious for most of the younger writers). In On the Road, Jack
Kerouac alludes to the fact that Burroughs pushed Spengler on everyone within his cirle
of influence, and some of the historical or cultural themes that On the Road seems to
contain are Spenglerian in tone, such as the obvious portrayal of Afiican-Americans as
the creative fellaheen who are crucial to the salvation, or reinvigoration, of the American
soul.

Kenneth Rexroth never explicitly admitted to a captivation for such historians of
dark (or in Toynbee's case, semi-dark) apocalypse and renewal, but many of his essays
and poems strongly imply that he considered these historians' general approach to the
history of culture as but statements of the obvious. In an interview with Linda Hamalian,
Robert Duncan relayed his impression that

"...Kenneth had a strong historical imagination, and could get very excited,

for example, about Toynbee. He liked to see history in terms of cycles,

and he had a strong identification with certain periods, the Hellenistic in

particular, which I also have. This is what I have in common with Gary

Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth, this business of relating to history in terms

of spiritual epochs that we relate to and other ones that we are antagonistic

to. It's all very post-Spenglerian" [5]

The idea of history being divided into "spiritual epochs," with the possibility that
they could be a part of ushering in a more habitable one than they were presently living

in, energized cultural radicals like Snyder, Duncan and Rexroth. This is the only

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explanation for why anarchists and pacifists would be favorable to such historicans, since
Spengler's Neitzschian overtones can potentially be used to justify militarism, and
Toynbee's laws of the growth of civilizations could justify imperialism in the way similar
to that in which Marx could be charged with justifying the historical emergence of the
bourgeoisie. These are perhaps the unavoidable dangers of trying to discern cycles of
recurrance in a history filled with militarism and imperialism, though, which is not in
itself a wrong-headed or immoral project [6].

Another deep attraction of Spengler and Toynbee for intellectuals with broad
cultural concerns was that their formulations seemed to resonate in an analogous way
with modern developments in philosophy and science. In most cases, a transposition of
terms across disciplines and cultural expressions is even possible, showing underlying
connections that speak to the existence of a cultural Weltanschauung. For example, in
the introduction to his Decline of the West, Spengler writes:

"Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture, and in this principle

we obtain the viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of

historical morphology become capable of solution. Civilizations are the

most external and artificial states of which a species of developed

humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding

the thing-becoming, death following life, petrifying world-city following

mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an

end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again." [7]

I have already touched upon how Joseph Needham, along with such prominent
theorists as Ross Harrison and Paul Weiss, were revolutionizing biological assumptions
with their organicist views, but even more remarkable was the way in which these

experimental findings in biology were finding resonance with certain developments

within speculative philosophy.

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For example, Spengler's basic formulation, stated above, positing civilizations as
behaving according to organic laws of process, is a rough transposition of Alfred North
Whitehead's general philosophical terms. Interestingly, Whitehead was one of the few
philosophers Rexroth pronounced an affinity for as a thinker, possibly because of the way
in which Whitehead collapsed metaphysics and science into a general view of reality that
supported both radicalism and spirituality.

In Science and the Modern World Whitehead challenged the fundamental
assumptions concerning matter, space and time as handed down to the twentieth century
from Plato, Aristotle, Newton, Locke, Descartes and Kant. But be challenged these
assumptions without radically disparaging the results of the science which was based on
them. He said that science had advanced by being based on these presuppositions, but
that for it to advance any further it must modify or discard them, since in reality it has
moved beyond the "common sense" implied in them and has pointed out their inherent
fallacies. [8]

For an example of how theory was outrunning common sense, according to
Whitehead, the notion of "position in space" as indicating a stable and enduring quality of
matter (and the presuppositions about existence and motion contained in this notion) is
undermined by the revelations of quantum physics, in which the behavior of electrons
requires for its explanation "some theory of discontinuous existence.” [9] Philosophy
began to point to this dilemna in the doctrine of materialism with Hume's skepticism. If
one begins to doubt the common-sense relationship between cause and effect, one must

also begin to doubt the methods and reasoning involved in traditional science. Science

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encountered a further threat with the idealism of Berkeley and the European Romantics,
in which matter was etherealized Whitehead acknowledged both the importance and the
limitations of these developments in philosophy as he developed his own theory of
process.

When process replaces traditional materialism as the basis of scientific thought,
cause and effect is retained but within a much more complex paradigm. In fact, under
Whitehead's theory, to account for every explanatory factor in even the simplest event
would be infinitely complex, yet by acknowledging this complexity one is able to retain
both the matter-of-fact existence materialism gives and the values idealism enables to
exist. Traditional science side-stepped this complexity by assuming that "the essence of
matter is spatial extension," and by assuming a mind/body dualism that set out
fundamental principles "as to presuppose independently existing substances with simple
location in the community of temporal durations, and in the case of bodies, with simple
location in the community of spatial extensions. Those principles lead straight to the
theory of a materialistic, mechanistic nature, surveyed by cogitating minds. " [10]

To Whitehead, these presuppositions predict the systems of Berkeley, Hume and
Kant, along with modern philosophy's preoccupation with epistemology, as these are
indicative of a limited grasp of the interrelationships between knowledge and experience,
mind and nature. Ultimately, these interrelationships are so complex and complete that
the dualistic distinctions are, at best, merely convenient, and in most cases, dangerously
misleading. Whitehead has appealed to poets because of his fluid and trans-formative

sense of reality, but his greatest appeal to Rexroth lay in his indictment of Western

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culture's "epistemological problem," its tendency to know things in terms of their discrete
object-ness instead of in fluid relational terms. This problem infected every area of the
culture, including its historical sense, and part of the ambitions of Spengler and Toynbee
involved a radical critique of traditional historiographical presuppositons in order to clear
away misleading distinctions.

Whitehead said that philosophy's role was to help us to critically revise our
"modes of abstraction," our logical ways of thinking about our experience. We cannot
think without abstracting, but there are ways of thinking, taught to us by philoSOphy, that
can help us come closer to reality in our presuppositions.

"In the analogy with Spinoza, his one substance [the monad] is for me the

one underlying activity of realization individualizing itself in an

interlocked plurality of modes. Thus, concrete fact is process. Its primary

analysis is into [the] underlying activity of prehension, and into realized

prehensive events. Each event is an individual matter of fact issuing from

an individualization of the substrate activity. But individualization does

not mean substantial independence...A prehension is a process of unifying.

Accordingly nature is a process of expansive development, necessarily

transitional from prehension to prehension What is achieved is thereby

passed beyond, but it is also retained as having aspects of itself present to

prehensions which lie beyond it. Thus nature is a structure of evolving

processes. The reality is the process." [1 1]

Similarly, when transposed into the terms of history and culture, Spengler and
Toynbee saw the study of history as needing to evolve beyond specific concerns over
nation-states, ethnicities, or even empires, in order to understand and identify the deeper
reality about its processes. The traditional historiography was useful, but based on
presuppositions that a broader world-historical outlook shows to be insufficient. In a

sense, the traditional historiographical methods were operating under presuppositions just

as philosophically fallacious as absolute position in space, especially when the
narrowness of their purview was considered.

The primary problem, though, with the traditional methods were that they bred a
skepticism about the possibilities of deep cultural renewal, resulting in revolutions that
are misunderstood by those who enact them and that are, most often, surface phenomena
that either don't really change anything about the basic cultural worldview, or mask the
deeper cultural tendencies that are in the process of realizing themselves. Similar to
Whitehead's view of philosophy, Spengler and Toynbee saw their histories as ways of
critically revising the abstractions we use when thinking about culture.

Being neither a professional historian or philosopher, Rexroth never gave rigid
technical meanings to such terms as Civilization and Culture, as Spengler does, yet the
general view of these historians that societies gradle become wedded to institutions
that forsake the incipient values they were once based upon, causing an organic counter-
reaction against these institutions, was an assumption upon which many of Rexroth's
works were based By the post-war period, he believed that a counter-reaction would
have to be based on absolute disaffiliation and, in order to prove itself valid, would have
to be much more than merely political. It must be the "prehension" of a new culture
realizing itself organically, or, in other words, the manifestation of a new world view in
every area of cultural activity. As he wrote in an essay entitled "The Students Take
Over," .

"For the Bolsheviks, the good society would come automatically if the

right power were applied to the right program. But power and program

are not the question: what matters is the immediate realization of humane
content, here, there, everywhere, in every fact and relationship of society.

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Today the brutal fact is that society cannot endure without this realization
of humane content. The only way to realize it is directly, personally, in
the immediate context. Anything else is not just too expensive; it is
wrecking the machinery. Modern society is too complex and too delicate
to afford social and political Darwinism any more. This means personal
moral action. I suppose, if you wish to call it that, it means a spiritual
revolution Prophets and seers have been preaching the necessity for
spiritual revolution for at least three thousand years and mankind has yet
to come up with a bona fide one. But it is that kind of action and that kind
of change that young people are demanding today." [12]

As stated before, both Spengler and Toynbee advance the metaphor of an
organism to describe world-history "as a picture of endless formations and
transformations,...the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms." The statement of
this metaphor in somewhat fluid terms leaves open the possibility that the decline and rise
of civilizations, even within the same geographic area, might overlap. In retrospect this
might be easy to identify. But what about the possibilities for contemporaneously
identifying where one is within the process? Whitehead brings in a conception of deity to
provide a directional consciousness, and thus a purposefulness, to nature's processes, but
Spengler and Toynbee began their projects convinced that such an identification
concerning culture can be generally, if not specifically, made by less-than-divine
observers.

Their desire to make such a judgment required their texts to be as bulky as they
are. In all of their descriptions of cultures throughout world history, they gradually build
an analysis of the general characteristics of cultures in their various stages of
development and decline. Yet, at the end of their respective analyses, what they have to
say about these accumulated characteristics is necessarily vague. Generally stated, they

find that the birth, development and death of cultures are frmctions of fluctuations in their

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vitality, a plotting of their tendency towards dynamism against their tendency towards
stasis.

We are left with questions about whether we need to look at a culture's economic
expansion, innovations in technology, or at its literary and artistic production in order to
judge its vitality? Or do we look at them in combination? What takes precedence? At
the end of thousands of pages, no clear answer is forthcoming. One of the only things the
reader can say is that it seems that. "creativity," broadly conceived, is an important
variable. Yet the question still lingers as to whether, in judging the stage at which a
civilization might be in its organic life cycle, the emphasis is to be placed primarily on
quantitative or qualitative factors.

Both historians also lack a definitive answer to this latter question, leaving us with
a sense that a living, or developing, culture is that which is best characterized by a sense
of vitality, vigor, creative flexibility, and revolutionary energy in the face of universal
cultural problems of survival, no matter what the form and content of these reactions may
be. To be fair, they also may not provide an answer to such questions because they are
questions regarding secondary effects, the material manifestations of more abstract forces
at work. The primal sources of these qualities 1 have just listed would be left out of the
analysis precisely because of their mysterious quality and unquantifiable existence.

Rexroth approached this issue in his one extended attempt to define his organic
cultural vision in historical terms. Communal ism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth
Century, a study of communal societies, was more specific as to a community's acutal

sources of vitality, yet was narrower in scope than Spengler's and Toynbee's studies

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because it did not attempt to define and analyze entire "spiritual epochs." Nonetheless, in
describing Bssenes, Anabaptists, Diggers, Shakers, Owenites, Brook Farmers, and
Fourierists, among others, he attempted to show that what all of them had in common
was

"a primary emphasis on man as a member of an organic community, a

biota, in creative, non-exploitative relationship with his fellows and his
environment. " [13]

Yet his significant historical insight is that these communities, though small, were
usually predictive of wider social changes to come within the larger societies that they
inhabited They were pressure points upon the overblown husk of the larger society and,
at times, initiated wider social and institutional change.

"The demand for change in the way of life [as embodied in the communal

societies] presses continuously against the blockage of obsolete social

structures and, in cases where the power structure can permit it,
overthrows and breaks through them." [14]

Religious attitudes and practices were usually the "organizer" within such
communities because they provided non-coercive structures within which the "largely
inchoate and instinctive...demand for freedom, community, life significance," and a non-
alienative environment could be best fulfilled and maintained. Twentieth century
bohemianism was an apocalyptic variant on this phenomenon and signified either the
death, or the birth of culture, "depending on how the [present] is resolved." [15] In all
reSpects, this seems to be a condensation and specification of the Spenglerian and
Toynbeean schemes.

Religious, or theological terms, similarily come closest to conveying the true

sense of what Spengler and Toynbee were trying to illustrate. The life and death of

civilizations are not to be considered in only physical terms - an expanding empire could
be "dead" and not know it. It is rather to be considered in similar terms to those the
Biblical writer is employing when he talks about "...you also, as living stones, are being
built up [into a] a spiritual house." [16] It is a sense of activity and stasis that transcends
purely physical significations, one which makes it possible to conceive of contemplation
as an action, or a determining factor in the history of a culture. But the issue is confused,
at times, by the historians' inability to talk about such things except in terms of material
cause-and-effect, in terms of more ordinary questions that historians are prone to involve
themselves with. Toynbee even uses Marxist terms to refer to a very un-Marxian
process.

" Starting with the initiation of primitive societies into civilizations we
have found that this consists in a transition from a static condition to a
dynamic activity; and we shall find that the same formula holds good for
the emergence of civilizations through the secessions of internal
proletariats from the dominant minorities of pre-existent civilizations
which have lost their creative power. Such domimnt minorities are static
by definition; for to say that the creative minority of a civilization in
growth has degenerated or atrophied into the dominant minority of a
civilization in disintegration is only another way of saying that the society
in question has lapsed from a dynamic activity into a static condition
Against this static condition the secession of a proletariat is a dynamic
reaction; and in this light we can see that , in the secession of a proletariat
from a dominant minority, a new civilization is generated through the
transition of a society fi'om a static condition to a dynamic activity, just as
it is in the mutation which produces a civilization out of a primitive
society." [17]

Rexroth is much more explicit, or explicit as one can be, in describing his sense of
this organic and mystical process. In fact, he rightly places the responsibility for the

health or vitality of a culture with the mystics when he states that

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"the interrelatedness of contemplatives is a skeleton or web which holds

the social body. There is a critical point when there isn't enough of this

web. We have long since reached that and passed it in America, and the

society goes completely to pieces, however healthy it may seem. And of

course the participants in the society violently deny that this is

happening." [18]

Yet both the historians and Rexroth would agree that the few remaining
contemplatives in the society would be an exception to this general denial. They are
those who recognize their own disconnection from a community, and who by their very
existence embody a judgment of the society's continuance apart from any interconnected
experience, apart from any connection to reality's vast web of interconnected meanings
and values. And as the civilization drifts further from its sustaining root system of
primary values and experiences, it becomes gauzed over with a skepticism that
disintegrates all values and meanings, except those that are thoroughly centered on the
lonely self.

All values are bureaucratized and take on objective, rather than human, meanings;
or as Rexroth says, all values are transmuted into their opposites. The longer this process
continues, the more radical and energetic must be any movement to reestablish social
relationships that are, at least from the organicist's point of view, entirely natural. Thus,
Rexroth's radicalism was not utopian, but grounded in an organic view of reality, a view
which provided him with a prophetic stance from which to judge the perversion of the
natural impetus towards sustaining relationships, and which allowed him to conceive of a
non-artificial hierarchy of values.

But at this point of recognition, according to the historians, two diverging and

competing phenomena begin to occur in the society that is perpetuating itself on the basis

of custom, and through the tenacity of besieged, individual selves. Those members of the
culture, usually of at least a semi-mystical temperament, who feel most deeply the
culture's malaise, look for models of re-integration in one of two places. Toynbee
employs the term mimesis in his description of the development of what are, in reality,
two competing societies; one is reactionary, the other radical and creative. He writes,

"In a society where mimesis is thus directed backward towards the past,

custom rules and society remains static. On the other hand, in societies in

process of civilization, mimesis is directed towards creative personalities

who command a following because they are pioneers. In such societies,

‘the cake of custom,‘ as Walter Bagehot called it in his Physics and

Politics, is broken and society is in dynamic motion along a course of

change and growth" [19]

The society that reacts by attempting to reenact the social, intellectual and
political mileau of the past effects an artificial, rather than organic, re-integration of
values and experience. The society that looks towards "creative personalities," those who
seem to be living out the culture's inherent potentialities, regains and builds upon its
culture's spiritual vitality. Thus, in a seeming paradox, it can appear to be both
conservative and radical at the same time. Consequently, the society that ignorantly
rejects its conservative (as opposed to reactionary) function, only increases the fiagility
of its already tenuous existence by failing to build on the dynamic possibilities that past
civilizations have opened up for them. Their primitivism, albeit radical, is static, not

replenishing or dialectic in a useful way.

Much of the motivation for Rexroth's "Classics Revisited" series on KPFA in

Berkeley had to do with his desire to reinvest the "creative personalities" of the past with

-57.

an immediacy for the post-war generation. It was an effort in "radical conservatism" that
held up such diverse figures as Euripides, Lucretius, Tu F u, Thomas More, John Bunyan,
Lao Tzu, St. Thomas Aquinas, Daniel Defoe, John Woolman and Leo Tolstoy as
expressive of ideas and ideals that could be put into action in 1950's America.

Toynbee thought that the resources for an integration of a new world civilization
could be found partly within the culture's Christian heritage of mystical practice and
critical self-awareness. As one of the "higher religions" (to be distinguished from
paganism) he saw the essence of Christianity (and presumably of Hinduism, Buddhism,
and Islam) as a promotion of social harmony and development through the spiritual
devotion of individuals. In contradicting J .G. Frazer's The Golden Bough, which posited
an antimony between the search for individual salvation and the maintainence of social
cohesion, Toynbee, the man of faith, boldly declares that the saints of history

"...in insulating themselves fiom their fellow men,...were entering into a

far more active relation with a fir wider circle than any that would have

centered around them if they had remained ‘in the World' and had spent

their lives in some secular occupation. They swayed the World from their

retreats to greater effect than the Emperor in his capital, because their

personal pursuit of holiness through seeking communion with God was a

form of social action that moved men more powerfully than any secular

social service in the political plane." [20]

Rexroth, both as an American and as a potential "creative personality," by the
post-war period communicated and embodied in himself both the necessary conservative
functions, and the prospective radical functions, of an integrative new society. In his
cultural vision be appropriated what was useful in the heritage of "Christian civilization,"
such as the Catholic Church's tradition of contemplative life, but also recognized the

incipient skepticism that had infected it at its roots. That skepticism allowed so often the

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transmutation of love into hatred (yet in the name of love) and of prayer into the rigidity
of law.

He also saw that the tradition of religious experience that could be traced through
the history of Western culture, considered essentially, found many analogues,
complementarities, and correctives in other world traditions, especially those of Asia
The religions that sprang from these experiential traditions may have developed along
strikingly different lines due to other cultural factors, but Rexroth asserted that, in
essence, the experiences (of the Real, of the Beatific vision, of Nirvana, etc) could not be
significantly differentiated, neither in quality, nor in immediate effects upon the
psychology of group experience.

In an essay Rexroth wrote while the controversy over Kennedy's Catholicism was
still alive, he asserted,

"Of course religious differences matter. But it is important to understand

why they matter. Religions are not ends in themselves, they are all means

to an end That end is an experience. Christians usually call that

experience the knowledge and love of God. Even these terms are only

means, inaaquate symbols which represent an experience which is

admitted by everyone to transcend all symbols and the very process of

representation itself. Disputes about religion are necessarily disputes

about the efficiency of means...the religious experience is not a logical

concept. It is not even a fact in the sense of a bit of information...these are

total experiences, not, for the individual himself, matters of statement.

Ultimately religion, and religions, are all focused on a total experience of

this kind." [21]

The religious nature of the San Francisco Renaissance will be considered much
more fully in a subsequent chapter, but it is worth noting that San Francisco, even in the
mid-twentieth century, was perhaps the only city in America that supported an

atmosphere for what Linda Hamalian has called Rexroth's "homegrown ecumenism," a

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primary emphasis on the fundamental religious experience rather than on the niceties of
creeds that excluded that experience. It is a large part of why Rexroth felt so strongly
about San Francisco's potential to be the center, not only of an alternative American

culture, but of a new and emerging world culture.

AN ESCHATOLOGY OF HOPE

I have suggested that Toynbee and Spengler were more important on a symbolic
level than they were on the analytical, that they were more important for what they
suggested than for what they tried to confirm. Perhaps their most important contribution
is that they made heroic attempts to give a historical shape and meaning to a growing
eschatological undercurrent in Western culture that goped toward apotheosis in the post-
World War 11 period.

Their studies, sometimes just by the suggestiveness of a title such as Decline of
the West, stood out as prophetic documents to a restless generation that was increasingly
in search of prophets, of whatever stripe, to break through the complacency. If Spengler
and Toynbee had provided only variations on the jeremiad, though, only pronouncements
of woe and destruction, they would not have been nearly so suggestive. In assuming
apocalypse under a non-linear paradign, they also intimated the rising of a new society
out of the still-warm ashes of the old.

Again the terms are vague, and in the case of Spengler must be discerned
negatively, but generally, the new society that both of them pointed to would be

characterized by the breaking down of artificial gogaphical barriers, the absense of a

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militaristic state in the modern sense, and the prioritization of the free and historically
shaped human will over abstract systems for ordering human relationships. Toynbee is
much more Optimistic in his analysis than Spengler, and his encompassing of both the
negative and the positive aspects of prophecy possibly reveals Rexroth's preference for
him over the German historian, whose excessive vagueness allowed him to be seen as
providing an apologetic for Nazism.

Toynbee, though dissatisfying on account of his inconsistencies as an analyst of
the particulars of history, provided Rexroth with a paradign for thinking about the
emerging counter-culture in the post-war years. Would it be all revolt and no renewal?
Would it contain a pedagogy within its prophecy? And would it be the new breath of a
rising culture, or merely the last bitter cry of a dead one?

Rexroth many times buried his tremendous historical optimism under a crankiness
that was alienating, yet that optimism was the ground of his entire world-view. He
believed that the history of culture contained the seeds of its own continuance, and those
seeds must be conserved in the consciousness of the counter-culture, a counter-culture
that would carry on vocations that had sprung up in healthier cultures in order to give
meaning to life.

"Artist, poet, physicist, astronomer, dancer, musician, mathemetician are

captives stolen fiom an older time, a different kind of society, in which,
ultimately, they were the creators of all primary values." [22]

To simply revolt against the past in all its forms and manifestations was cultural
suicide. Rather, the vocations listed above had to regain their central, culturally

responsible, originative functions in order for society to maintain life-sustaining values.

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Nevertheless, revolt was a necessary first step in that it gave the lines of dissent a tone of
absoluteness, a breaking away from all forms of liberal compromise and authoritarianism.

The sustaining values of the new culture had to be discerned within the past,
brought forward uncorroded by the historical stains of skepticism and alienation by
critical consciousnesses, and made relevant to contemporary living conditions through
the various vocations. Then they would be truly sacramental values, based on inward
spiritual realities, and able to bind together individuals in the transcendence to be found
in the real, a transcendence that, according to Rexroth, poetry was peculiarly able to

express and disseminate.

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CHAPTER 2 NOTES

1. Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980: An
Illustrated History, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 86.

2. Jonathan Edwards, "Benjamin Colrnan's Abridgement, November 1736," The
Great Awakening, ed. by CC. Goen, (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1972), 125.

3. Kenneth Rexroth, review of Science and Civilization in China, vol. IV:2, by

Joseph Needham.

4. Donna J. Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in

Twentieth Century Developmental Biology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976),

14.

5. Linda Hamalian, “Robert Duncan on Kenneth Rexroth,” in Conjunctions 4, 91.

6. Spengler and Toynbee did not help their cause by either retreating from public

scrutiny (Spengler) or changing their mind (Toynbee).

7. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, ed. by Arthur Helps (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1991), 24.

8. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures, 1925 (The

MacMillan Company, 10th ed, 1960), 106-107.

9. Ibid,, 124.

10. Ibid, 13 l.

11. Ibid, 68, 70.

12. Rexroth, "The Students Take Over," World Outside the Window: The

Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New Directions, 1987),
1 16.

13. Rexroth, Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (New York:

Seabury Press, 1974), xiii.

14. Ibid, xvi.

15. Ibid, xviii.

16. I Peter 2:5

17. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Abridgement of Volumes I-VI by DC.

Somervell, (Oxford University Press, 1946), 50-51.

18. L.S. Dembo and Cyrena Pondrom, eds, The Contemporary Writer:

Interviews with Sixteen Novelists and Poets (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1972), 164.

19. Toynbee, 49.

20. Toynbee, Abridgement of Volumes VII-X by DC. Somervell, (Oxford University

Press, 1957), 81.

21. Kenneth Rexroth, "Religion: Unifying or Dividing?" (UCLA Special Collections)

22. Rexroth, ”San_Francisco Letter," World Outside the Window, 59.

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CHAPTER 3: "THE MEASURE OF THE DEFECT 0F VISION IS VISIONS":
THE RELIGIOUS ANARCHISM OF KENNETH REXROTH AND THE SAN
FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE

"The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has
been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both. " (Gary
Snyder, "Buddhism and the Coming Revolution")

"Every day all states do things which. if they were the acts of individuals,
would lead to summary arrest and often execution " (Kenneth Rexroth)

By the 19505, the San Francisco area was heir to long and still vital traditions of both
religious mysticism and political radicalism Almost all of the poets of the San Francisco
renaissance were united around a distaste for the State in its modern form and a general
respect for, or adoption of, a religiously mystical view of reality. It was in the San Francisco
renaissance and Kenneth Rexroth's influence upon it, though, that these two traditions
mergedinaculturallymeaningfulway. Andthefactthatmostofthepoetsofthe
renaissance could be broadly described as "religious anarchists" enabled them to produce
poetries that were widely resistant to assimilation by the dominant commercial culture, and

that had the potential to provide the impetus for a viable counter-culture.

RELIGIOUS DYNAMICS IN POST-WAR AMERICA
Post-World War H America is usually not seen as a period marked by geat religious
depth. Writers such as Peter Berger, Will Herberg have argued that the nation was
dominated throughout the period by a common cultural religion, usually cloaked in

Protestant forms, that by and large amrmed the values of technological "efficiences" and of

-74-

unbounded economic prosperity over traditional spiritual values. It was a religious culture
that seemed to preach "adjustment" to a society that was "ftmdamentally good" [1], but that,
according to Berger and others, had also abdicated an independent prophetic function and
that had denied, in a psychological sense, the more grisly realities of American life. Herberg
explains this lack of opposition by contending that

"...the religion which actually prevails among Americans today has lost

much of its authentic Christian (or Jewish) content..American religion and

American society would seem to be so closely interrelated as to make it

virtually impossible to understand either without reference to the other." [2]

Thus for Herberg, American religion was just one more (probably necessary) prop to
American and personal identity. Contrarily, Berger asserted that this "cultural religion"

"...provides the individual with the means by which he can hide from himself

the true nature of his existence. Religion reassures and strengthens him in

his social roles, however 'inauthentic' these may be. Religion thus tends to

beanobstacleintbeprogresstowards'authenticity'asaperson Inaword,

religion prevents ecstacy. " [3]

The final sentence above would have struck Rexroth and most of the San Francisco
poets as ironic, since their view of religion was that it was one of the primary vehicles of
ecstatic experience, not necessarily in a Reichian sense, but in the deeper sense of
transcending the selfin the Other through love. Unlike Berger, though, they would not have
articulated their critique in the such doctrinaire existential terms, since existentialism as a
formal philosophy was, in many cases, another impediment to the kind of ecstacy they were
seeking. For Rexroth, existentialism was a logical outgowth of the dualistic Augustinian
and Descartian philosophies that had dominated Western thought for so many centuries. It
posited the Self within an ultimately impenetrable aloneness. Rexroth and Robert Dtmcan,

if they would have bothered to use such terms, would have argued that existentialism was

-75-

itself an impediment to authenticity, since it created artificial psychological barriers to
intense interpersonal experience.

Instead of adopting existentialist rationales for the relevance of religion, they found
religion as religion to be valid on its own gounds. When used as a prop to social, cultural
or philosophical identity, it was always perverted, made into less than it actually was. They
saw religious modes of thought and action as providing the most significant ways of
confronting and mitigating the accumulated ills of mankind And, like Jesus or Sakyamrmi,
they found that their reinterpetations of older traditions put them into a position of
advocating a non-violent anarchy towards temporal institutions, while stressing the virtues
of personal responsibility and counter-cultural wisdom. On this nakedly historical and
simple approach hinged much of the alternativity of the San Francisco literary community.

This alternativity takes its part within one of the strongest historical dichotomies that
religion in the Western world has experienced Historians have used various terms to
describe this conflict: "Law" versus "Spirit," tradition versus innovation, institutional
authority versus individualism, etc. Whatever terms one uses, from the Puritan suppression
of dissenters like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, through the Charles Chauncy-led
subversion of Jonathan Edwards at Northampton, the Unitarian response to the
Transcendentalists, up to the varieties of anti-modernism that arose in the early twentieth
century and still exist today, this dynamic has occurred intensely and regularly in the
American religious experience.

The San Francisco renaissance undoubtedly contributed to a continuation of the

"Spirit" aspect of this dichotomy, but Kenneth Rexroth's vision was unique within this

-75-

rnfleauinthatheckahedto(neau:acmmnnnphuhn:connnunhythatnansunukxlflu:duahq/
entirely. Individual revolt, followed by a seeldng after new terms and forms of personal
responsibility, was Rexroth's ideal formula for counter-cultural formation and integation

San Francisco culture in the 1950s revealed a growing awareness of its own cultural
nuanhngtfiih51nvomd[negnnnmuflswunslxnumenthe(knnmmntpohfiafl:flnunmmstn7
Western culture and the soon-to-be pervasive religious modes of Southeast Asia. Thus, to a
certain extent it became the testing gound for both the continuing validity of these
structures and modes within a new intemationalist perspective, and for the possibilities of
legitimately blurring the boundaries between even such frmdamental cultural categories as
religion and politics.

Kenneth Rexroth was possrbly more conscious than anybody of this junction of
cultural meanings and opportunities that San Francisco represented following the war, and
out of this understanding he developed his ideas about the religious and communal functions
of poetry that would allow it to provoke and maintain the existence of an alternative culture
there. For Rexroth, poetry had the potential to maintain the community offreedom and love
that mystics and anarchists had always talked about It was, potentially, both a mode of
disafiliation and a remedy to cultural nihilism.

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REXROTH AND THE ANARCHISTS

Kenneth Rexroth is usually characterized as someone who began his literary life as a
radical activist but who mellowed into more of a contemplative recluse as he grew older.
This view is supported by a consideration of his hyperkinetic activities on behalf of the left
during the thirties, juxtaposed against his relatively low-key existence during the similarly
charged years of the 19605 and early 1970s. This standard profile is accurate as far as it
goes, but ignores several salient facts about his life, for example, that he voluntarily entered
a Catholic monastery for a time while still a teenager, that he was a fairly energetic
participant in the Vietnam-era ecology movement, and that a contemplative temperament
always tmderlay his political commitments.

In a 1931 letter to Louis Zukofsky, Rexroth explained that his immanent attachment
to the Communist Party gew out of a religious and aesthetic view of life that was more
comprehensive than the Marxist system [4], and he never embraced Marxism with the
religious fervor of many of his contemporaries, partly because he did not need to fill the
same sort of existential void the others seemed to feel. He never threw himself into the
Commrmistcausewiththeradical zealotryofsomanyothers,asifitwereadivineprophetic
u'uflrtobeacceptedatfacevalueandblindlytrustedbecauseitwasflreonly description of
reality. He also did not accept the mythological rmderpinnings that were psychologically
attractive to many who became militant Communists during the thirties. Arthur Koestler
describes the parallelism between Communist and religious militancies in this way:

"From the psychologist's point of view, there is little difference between a

revolutionary and a traditionalist faith All true faith is uncompromising,

radical, purist; hence the true traditionalist is always a revolutionary walot in
conflict with pharasaian society, with the lukewarm corrupters ofthe creed

-78-

And vice-versa: the revolutionary's Utopia, which in appearance represents
a complete break witll the past, is always modeled on some image of the lost
Paradise, of a legendary Golden age. The classless Communist society,
according to Marx and Engels, was to be a revival, at the end of the
dialectical spiral, of the primitive Communist society which stood at its
beginning Thus all true faith involves a revolt against the believer's social
environment, and the projection into the future of an ideal derived from the
remote past All Utopias are fed from the sources of mythology; the social
engineer's blueprints are merely revised editions of the ancient text" [5]

Rather than falling into this sort of bi-polar thinking, Rexroth's Marxism was, as
seen retrospectively, simply a theoretical aid to comprehending the dynamics of social
relations while also serving as an adjunct to his view of history. It was never, to him, "the
god that failed." He accepted it during the thirties as the most radical, yet practical, means
for improving the relations of production and consumption on a large scale. He saw it in its
ideal form as a much more humane way of organizing society than capitalism, and saw it as
conforming to primitive religious virtues more than any other system, yet when methods
weredictatedtohimhewasnotwillingtosacrificetothe Party his identityasan
independent artist or his personal integity as an intellectual.

By the mid-19305 he had already been disillusioned by the way the national party in
America was willing to subsume the full reality of persons to an abstract cause and to
arbitrary decrees. When the revelations about Stalin's regime came out in the next few
years, it was too late for him to be surprised By then, he was well on his way towards
moving into a full-fledged anarchism, a political (or a-political) stance that complemented,
with less contradictions, his basic identity as a poet and religious mystic.

If Rexroth can be credited with farming the flames of anarchism in mid-century San

Francisco,asIthinkhecanbe,itwouldbeonaccountofhisdisseminationoftheprimary

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intemational anarchist writers like Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkrnan (post-pri son
writings), and Peter Kropotkin in the various anarchist meetings he was involved with, and
even through his KPFA "Classics Revisited" broadcasts. In these writers he found an
anarchism that was rooted in human personality, a practical theory for direct action in the
interests of an integrated society, and somewhat surprisingly, a radical stance that did not
disallow his mystical leanings. They provided theoretical fundamentals for a modern
anarchist movement, not progams to be systematically canied out.

The anarchists named above were motivated by a radical humanism. In their
writings they seem to be truly possessed by an esteem for the inherent powers of the human
intellect and action They were not all Rousseauean idealists, but felt that the whole
question of human nature, as usually posed by philosophers and theologians, was based on
bogus a priori assumptions that admitted very little connection between human nature and
the social environment that effected it As Emma Goldman wrote,

"Poor human nature, what honible crimes have been committed in thy

name? Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flat-headed person to

the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human

nature. The geater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on

the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can anyone

speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered,

wounded, and maimed? John Burroughs has stated that experimental study

of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits,

their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil

in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped

daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities? Freedom,

expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us

the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities."
[6]

In Mutual Aid, Petr Kropotkin explicated a theory of human sociability that directly

subverted most of the major political ideas of western culture, and that provided anarchists

-30-

with a historical jsutification for their optimism about an institution-less human society. He
wrote,

"Sociability and need of mutual aid and support are such inherent parts of
human nature that at no time of history can we discover men living in small
isolated families, fighting each other for the means of subsistence. On the
contrary, modern research...proves that since the very beginning of their
prehistoric life men used to agglomerate into gentes, clans, or tribes,
maintained by an idea of common descent and by worship of common
ancestors. For thousands and thousands of years this organization has kept
men together, even though there was no authority to impose it. It has deeply
impressed all subsequent development of mankind; and when the bonds of
common descent had been loosened by migrations on a gand scale, while
the development of the separated family within the clan itself had destroyed
the old unity of the clan, a new form of union, territorial in its principle - the
village community - was called into existence by the social genius of man.
This institution, again, kept men together for a number of centuries,
permitting them to further develop their social institutions and to pass
through some of the darkest periods of history, without being dissolved into
loose aggregations of families and individuals, to make a further step in their
evolution, and to work out a number of secondary social institutions, several
of which have survived down to the present time. We have now to follow
the further developments of the same ever-living tendency for mutual aid"

[7]

The anarchists contradicted the Darwinian notion of "smvival of the fittest" and
never really allowed for the possibility that in the last analysis, after all the chains upon it
had been loosed, that human nature wouldn't turn out to be basically benevolent Instead, as
Alexander Berkrnan writes, they had seen enough, had caught suflicient glimpses, of the
potentialities of the strictly human (within inhuman conditions) to make grand
generalimtions about what an anarchist future would be like.

"Life in freedom, in anarchy, will do more than liberate man merely from his

present political and economic bondage. That will be only the first step, the

preliminary to a truly human existence. Far geater and more siglificant will

be the results of such liberty, its effects upon man's mind, upon his

personality. The abolition of the coercive external will, and with it the fear
of authority, will loosen the bonds of moral compulsion no less tlmn of

-31-

economic and political. Man's spirit will breathe freely, and that mental
emancipation will be the birth of a new culture, of a new humanity...Instead
of "thou shalt not," the public conscience will say "thou mayest, taking firll
responsibility"...Life will mean the striving for finer cultural values, the
penetration of nature's mysteries, the attainment of higher truth. Free to
exercise the limitless possibilities of his mind, to pursue his love of
knowledge, to apply his inventive genius, to create, and to soar on the wings
of imagination, man will reach his full stature and become man indeed..He
will scorn uniformity, and human diversity will give him increased interest
in, and a more satisfying sense of, the richness of being;...he will
attain-freedom in joy." [8]

In keeping with its non-ideological impulse, anarchism, for these thinkers, was also
not a progam that could be definitively and universally stated in a manifesto, like the
multiple pronouncements of the Italian Futurists. Where Marx condemned ideologies
because they masked the true sources of economic oppression, the anarchists went firrther in
condemning every single restriction upon human fieedom and the human spirit, except in
cases where communities create uncoerced conditions of mutual reciprocity. Emma
Goldman writes on the "anarchist method,"

"Anarchism is not, as some may suppose, a theory ofthe firture to be realized
through divine inspiration It is a living force in the affairs of our life,
constantly creating new conditions. The methods of Anarchism therefore do
not comprise an iron-clad progam to be carried out under all circumstances.
Methods must gow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and
of the individual and temperamental requirements of the individual. The
serene, calm character of a Tolstoy will wish different methods for social
reconstruction than the intense, over-flowing personality of a Michael
BakuninoraPeterKropotkin Equallysoitmustbeapparerrtthatthe
economic and political needs of Russia will dictate more drastic measures
than would England or America. Anarchism does not stand for military drill
and uniformity; it does, however, stand for the spirit of revolt, in whatever
form, against everything that hinders human growth All Armrchists agree in
that, as they also agree in their opposition to the political machinery as a
means of bringing about the great social change." [9]

-32-

The means for social change is instead phrased in terms of "direct action." Even
Kropotkin and Tolstoy, the most pacifistic of the radical anarchists, believed in a type of
direct action tlmt took place outside sanctioned channels of social action. Anarchists could
point to nearly every social change in modern history that brought about geater individual
fi'eedom and fulfillment and assert that only direct and courageous personal action broke
down the claims of custom and the moral fogginess of the "political machinery." In many
ways, the anarchist ideal of direct action was more fitted to the American environment than
any other, since the Declaration of Independence and the Revolution were strikes at one
very ingrained type of "political superstition" As Goldman writes again:

"The political superstition is still holding sway over the hearts and minds of

the masses, but the true lovers of liberty will have no more to do with it.

Instead, they believe-that man has as much liberty as he is willing to take.

Anarchism therefore stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and

resistance to, all laws and restrictions, which lead to economic, social, and

moral degadation. But defiance and resistance to them are illegal. Therein

lies the salvation of man Everything illegal necessitates integity, self-

reliance, and courage...Direct action, having proven efl‘ective along

economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. There

a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistant resistance to

them will finally set him free. Direct action against the wrongful authority in

the shop, direct action against the authority of the lawless law, direct action

against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical,

consistent method of Amarchism." [10]

Just as was the case with religious anarchists who historically preceded him,
Rexroth's mystical religious leanings did not conflict with his endorsement of anarchist
virtues, since the anarchist rejection of the church as an institution was based on it's historic
role as an exterior controlling force upon the lives of individuals. In this role it was rendered
equivalent to the State and the Capitalist system. Anarchists believed that these institutions

imposed order through physical, economic, or psychological force and justified themselves

-33-

by claiming to be the necessary safeguards of freedom. The standard anarchist response has
been that "liberty is the mother (and not the daughter) of order."

Rexroth would add a further subtlety to this argument by pointing to the fact that
most individuals are already on the very edge of a practical anarchism in their daily lives.
Most individuals, he claimed, strived to live in such a way that left them as free as possible
from institutional control. Whether true or not, the "anarchist meth " aligred itself very
well in America with a dominant pragnatic mood This pragnatism directed American
citizens to cast a wary eye upon the few who take it upon themselves to lord it over the
many. 3

To Rexroth, what amounted to a practical escape from institutional control was quite
simple, requiring, though, a measure of courage, integity and self-reliance. In the tradition
of Thoreau, one could carry out the firm decision to step outside the system in a personal act
of autonomy, or, in the language that many of the churches degraded, one can sanctijy
oneself. One could do this in a religious sense by opting out of the degaded religious value
systems of the dominant cultural religion and returning to the simple doctrines and
experiences of the primary texts and communities. Such a return to the type of religion
revealed in the primary texts, though, would do much to undermine the bases upon which
institutional churches have justified themselves. As Rexroth writes,

"The geat churches have indisputably compromised the simple ethics of the

Gospels, and yet, Protestant and Catholic, they have always represented the

Christian ethic as extraordinarily difficult and even unpleasant It is nothing
of the sort" [11]

Rexroth claimed that the ethics of the Gospels are not diflicult or unpleasant,

because they are the ethics that arise out ofa community attempting to live together in

-34-

illurninated harmony, or even, more simply, those of a social group which values its own
survival. In a review of Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You, Rexroth brushes
aside as ironic the criticisms that have labeled Tolstoy a crank, since, as he writes, the
religion of Tolstoy

"...in the final analysis...is not cranky or odd at all. It is common The

siglificant thing is that, by and large, give and take a few pathetic sins, men

do not behave in their daily relations with one another as states and churches

and even abstractions like classes behave on the stage of history. If they had,
we wouldn't be here." [12] '

World War 11 did much to cement the fusion between Rexroth's anarchism, his
mystical temperrnent and his aesthetic vision It first of all left no doubt as to the potential
for evil inherent in the modern state. It revealed to him that the primary function of the
modern state was to wage war, or as the old anarchist adage put it, "War is the health of the
state." Also, as a conscientious objector himself, and as someone who actively came to the
aid of other CO’s, he geatly admired religious goups, primarily Quakers, who during the
war resisted the government with a sense of purpose that obviously emanated from a core of
mystical piety. Finally, he became linked up with artists and poets of a religious
temperament, many of whom, like William Everson, resided in CO camps all over the
Pacific Northwest Many of these sought him out when they were released and took a large
role in the broad cultural activities that made up the San Francisco renaissance.

All of this led to a crystallization and focusing of Rexroth's activities after the war.
No longer would there he attempts to be a part of a larger national radical organization, or to
compromise in a sort of "united front" mentality. In a 1969 interview, he described how this

focused activity gew out of, but also constituted a break from, his earlier activities.

.35-

"All during those years [19305] we always had poetry readings and
discussions and then during the war we set up a thing called the Randolph
Bourne Cormcil in which we gathered up the radical intellectuals in town

that were not Stalinist We tried to gather the Trotskyites, which was

hopeless. Immediately after the war we simply organized an open and

aboveboard Anarchist Circle. We used to have bigger meetings than any

other radical goup." [13]

I've written elsewhere that this "Anarchist Circle" gadually developed into regular
Friday evening soirees at Rexroth's house where be exercised an intense cultural influence;
in the intervening years it was known most regularly as the "Libertarian Circle." At these
meetings there was, in reaction to the habits of orthodox Bolshevism, neither hierarchy nor
agenda Most of the time was spent working out "new techniques of goup relationships"
[14] which proved fundamental to anchoring a pervasive anarchist sentiment within San
Francisco culture by the time of the Six Gallery reading. About this evolution in the cultural
atmosphere, Rexroth observed,

"Between 1950 and 1955, the necessity for organization began to die out

because other people could become activist It was no longer necessary to

educatesomebodytomakeananarchistpoetoutofhirn. He hadamileauin

which he could naturally become such a thing. But for years, it was a slow

process of breaking down rigid ideologies and then creating a difl‘erent

thing." [15]

That "different thing" was a cultural atmosphere in which all ideological political
and social orders which did not gow out of the organic experience of the local community
were viewed with suspicion They were seen as imposing an artificial order, and thus
artificial values, upon a community whose shared daily life did not reinforce the legitimacy
of those values. The end of such an imposition was an atmosphere of social alienation and

cultural fragnentation, if not actual death The alternative was to, ideally, live as if the

community existed in a state pre-existent to all ideological systems. Yet as the quote above
attests, this was no easy process.

Herbert Read, the English anarchist and art critic, has pointed out that anarchy
means "without ruler," not "without order" [16]. Though some San Francisco writers of the
time may have suscribed to the extremism of the latter definition, mostincluding Rexroth,
viewed anarchism as an existential mode wherein the debris of "consurnerized" political
stances was gadually cleared away so that social values and orderings could arise out of
intense and deeply shared experiences, and not just by reverting to "natural law." As will be
discussedinthenextchapter,thepoetryreading(sometimestojazz) carnetobeseenasan
opportunity for the poet to enter into a type of communion with the audience based upon
how he or she valued and imaginatively ordered a realm of shared experiences.

But to Rexroth and those he influenced, anarchism was, most flmdamentally, a
means to a religious end, especially when combined with the practice of poetry. Anarchism,
as a social practice and community ideal, allowed, and was in turn supported by, the

attainment of sacramental vision, or, as Rexroth liked to call it, the "religious experience."

LITERARY-RELIGIOUS STYLES OF ANARCHISM
Rexroth's emphasis on how the "religious experience" helped to maintain an
organieally healthy community and culture serves to highlight his divergence ficm other
literary sensibilities and goupings that were at least tinged with an anarchist flavor in the

post-war period .

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Geofl‘rey Ostergaard, in a contemporary analysis of the beat movement, lumped
beats, beatniks, and hipsters together as "latter-day anarchists," as individuals who are not
simply rebels lacking a political party to focus their energies, but who are concerned
primarily with present and immediate personal relationships, and who are eschatological,
rather than utopian, in outlook. He said that they were individuals who, primarily through
the practice of Zen, sought a type of existential salvation.

This salvation, though, could only be found deeply within the self and its individual
resources, since Ostergaard characterizes Zen as "an intensely personal, subjective
religion..and one which discounts logic, intellect, memories of the past and present, and fear
of the future, relying instead on flash-like moments of intuition" [17]. In the way that
Ostergaard described it, it was a type of salvation that has become a cliche of both
Hollywood and the self-help industry - "look deep inside yourself to find the key to
happiness and success." The question arises, though, as to whether what Ostergaard really
was describing were the characteristics of individuals who functioned as popular mediators,
and inevitably dilutors, of the primary vision, which offered a more profound salvation and
was siglificantly more subversive of the dominant American culture.

Ostergaard's description of Zen as a religious mode of expression that was primarily
irrational, uncommitted and centered on the self explains why it was easily popularized
within certain segnents of American culture, but on this basis its true alternativity,
especially according to Rexroth's ideas, must be questioned The possibility remains that it
was merely the (Jungian) shadow of the dominant culture expressing itself through a

dramatimtion of the self's plight under institutional control.

In order to be truly alternative under the Rexrothian model the beats would have had
to disaffiliate not only fiom those dominant forms of religiosity in post-war America that
resisted creativity, individuality, and all that was potentially ecstatic about life, but also
those lingering forms of romanticism that ultimately rejected all social values as illusory
because of the illusory nature of those embodied in the present society. In their failure to
disaffiliate in this regard, they fell short of being true religious anarchists, and were merely
literary and cultural romantics that were caught within the vicissitudes of the lonely self
within a static society.

Lionel Trilling saw John Keats as helping to create this particular romantic
archetype, and strangely celebrated it in his essay "The Poet as Hero...". Trilling claimed
that Keats found in Shakespeare's dramas a suggestion of the only salvation possible, which
is a "tragic salvation, the soul accepting the fate that defines it" [18]. This is essentially
salvation through withdrawal, a stoic casting of the creative Self ever deeper into the Selfto
escape outside forces of disintegration. This withdrawal leaves open no avenue for entering
into social (or spiritual) imity with the Other, in whatever guise it may present itself.

The only meaningful reality than becomes an heroic elaboration of the Self within an
ultimate aloneness, since that is what is recoglized as the defining fate. It is inevitable that
such a tragic romanticism would conflate art and religion in an equation of values, since a
religion that carried with it values of a more comprehensive order than aesthetic values
would be impossible to conceive. So religion as religion is lost, along with its potentially
life-affirming social values.

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Ironically, Keats found descendents not only in the beat movement, but in the
seemingly anti-romantic and unheroic inhabitants of what has already been described as the
East Coast literary establishment. One of the most remarkable phenomenons to hit English
Departments and literary quarterlies in mid-twentieth century America was a massive so-
called "return to religion" In some ways this was related to the general swelling of the
church rolls in the post-war period, but in other important ways it was similar to the type of
withdrawal from creative interaction with the Other that Keats exemplified In this case,
though, it was not a falling back on the semi-divine Self that occurred; rather, it was the
investment of religion with a role as literature's keeper, as literature had already been
invested with the role of maintaining a certain kind of civilized ideal.

Since most of English literature had been written within a Christian mileau,
Christianity became an essential link to a past, or tradition, that was now accorded semi-
divine status in a world of chaos. Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv was one of the most
perceptive observers of this subtle intermingling, or even equation, of the values of literature
and religion. In a 1950 essay entitled, "Religion and the Intellectuals," he explained that
post-war writers and critics were embracing traditionalism, not belief in God; that "the
center of gavity of traditionalism is seldom in religious experience (italics mine). Its center,
clearly, is in the attachment to the social and cultural order of some past age in which
religion, in a highly developed and institutionalized form, played an integral part" [19].
Thus, religion became one more means of social control, not a mode of existence in which
life became centered around the multi-faceted experience of transcendence. The core of
such a "bloodless religion" (Rahv) was inherently alienating, in that the Self continually

attempted to re-enact the past in the midst of present realities that called for creative
attention This is accomplished by a type of measured withdrawal from experience in the
name of authority.

As described earlier, variations on this type of paranoid religious mode have
occurred throughout the history of American culture. It is a mode that prefers a codified
order over a more spontaneous openness to experience and new meanings; it finds its
identity within long or succussfully established institutions; and it prefers to maintain a sort
of aura around specialized social roles and activities that have perhaps outlived their original
meanings. Almost by definition, those who seek to exist within alternative, but possibly
more truly traditional, religious modes are seen to be propagating a dangerous anarchism.

It is also ironic that it was the academic keepers of literature in the post-war period
who looked to the artist to fulfill the autonomous and semi-divine role of savior of society,
whereas the avant-garde writers of the San Francisco Bay area usually saw themselves
operating within a community of artists (in which the poetry reading functioned as a sort of
metaphor). They also saw the artist as much more of a contributing member within, instead
of outside, society, and they allowed art and religion to occupy their separate, yet
complementary, spheres of activity. By tapping into much more enduring traditions and
conceptions of the artist in society, the San Francisco poets were, in a sense, the true
traditionalists. As Rexroth put it,

"...modem literary and artistic society tends to substitute art for religion

Muchmodemcriticismplacesaburdenontheartistthathewasnever

desigred to bear. On the other hand, modern social practice, rather than

theory, has led to a radical divorce between the professional practice of

religion and the practice of the arts. This is just part of the over-
specialization of modem life. There is no reason why a saint oratheologian

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should not be a very geat poet...It would be very nice if this sort of thing
were to come back into fashion" [20]

As one of the bases of an anarchist philosophy is an emphasis on giving human
beings the freedom to explore multiple roles and potentials, anarchism seeks to allow the
enhancement of an organic social reality in which differing roles are acknowledged within
society, but more fluidity is allowed to occur between them than is allowed within a static
hierarchical society. Rexroth himself was an example of the merging of different social
roles within one person As a poet, journalist, painter, labor agitator, teacher, outdoorsman,
and community leader, to name only the most prominent, his personality was a merging of
many roles and perspectives. This openness to a fluidity between artistic and political roles
can also be seen in the careers of Gary Snyder, William Everson, Allen Ginsberg, and

Michael McClure.

THE PRACTICE OF RELIGIOUS ANARCHISM
Kenneth Rexroth fundamentally ageed with Herbert Read, contra Marxist
materialism and anarchists like Michael Bakunin and Emma Goldman, that a healthy society
rested upon an irrational religious or mystical base. In Anarchy and Order, Read wrote that
"there has never been a civilization without its corresponding religion, and the appearance of
rationalism and skepticism is always a symptom of decadence" [21]. "Communist"
anarchism, like that of the writers mentioned above, was useful as a practical revolutionary

method and one that was available to creative individuals, either alone or in community,

apart from political organimtions.

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Yet, despite the warm-blooded pragnatism it ideally exercised, Rexroth observed
that it was also liable to fall into ideological obfuscations, non-relevance, and organimtional
wrangling in its actual practice. George Woodcock, an old anarchist friend of Rexroth's,
gives some reasons why Rexroth could have been no longer be considered a "pure"
Communist-Anarchist, part of an international anarchist movement, by the turn of the half-
century.

"...there was indeed a doctrimire aridity about anarchism in the later 19405

that made it almost qualify as one of George Orwell's ‘ smelly little

orthodoxies.‘ The old movement of Kropotkin and Malatesta was virtually

moribund, and the new movement of the late 19605 had not yet risen from

the cooling ashes. The atmosphere of petty intolerance drove me out of the

movement, and I suspect this was what repelled Rexroth - this and an

absense of passion, which had breathed out of the British movement when

Marie Louise Bemieri died in 1949." [22]

Toynbee and Spengler had postulated that religion was a key factor in social
upheaval and reconstruction It was the force that caused the downfall of a civilization's
inert instituitions. Whereas anarchism was logically the end of the road in political
disafliliation, it also showed that it was insufficient by itself to repel, or even practically
resist, the suble forces of disintegation that had corrupted every ideological movement and
party in the history of Western culture. It was a necessary stance in the economic, social and
institutional realms of American life for the San Francisco poets of the post-war era, but it
had to be sustained by something much more comprehensive, or direct, in its apprehension
of reality.

For Rexroth, that reality had to be conceived of as encompassing both social vision
and quotidian detail. It had to be conceived ofas the same type of reality religion had

always attempted to speak to in its ideality. Yet when religion failed to be relevant to both

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vision and the physically real, when it failed to somehow equate them in a transcendence of
the real through the real," it was religion in stasis, a religion thathad also lost touch with its
connection to poetry.

The Mexican modernist poet Octavio Paz has written extensively about the relation
between the "poetic word" and the "religious word." He observes that they both reflect
experiences we have of our constitutive "otherness," our strangeness to what is real, and our
attempt to bridge the gap. According to Paz, religion is that which depends on theological
formulations for its identity, theology being fundamentally an interpretation of our
condition. Poetry, on the other hand, is a revelation of our condition, and serves to open up
possibilities of being [23]. Both theology (as a type of criticism) and poetry are necessary to
our self-understanding and self-integation, yet poetry, in this modernist analysis, takes
primacy, for without it, theology loses its conduit to revelation, whereas poetry without
theology still exists as potential. Additionally, a theology tlmt rejects the revelations of
poetry is open to all sorts of artificialities and, moreover, encourages a wariness of the
Other, which is nowseenasathreatratherthanameanstoamorenuanced senseofboth
self and reality.

When Rexroth spoke of religion in the sense of being the basis for the genuine
anarchism which ushers in the new organic society, he was referring to an experience of
religion that, in terms of theology, is not estranged from its sense in the poetic word It is
also a religion that is highly applicable to normal, everyday life. When philosophers and
theologians view-reality, or our condition in reality, as something abstracted from quotidian

existence and the struggle for physical survival and culture, they are guilty of over-

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spiritualization, according to Rexroth Additionally, when physical reality is seen as
possessing absolute contingency within an abstract framework built around beliefs about
some higher, trans-mundane reality, religion, poetry and even vision, have parted ways.
With echoes of William James in the air, Rexroth wrote, in an article about Lafcadio Hearn's
experience of Buddhism in Japan, that
"for Hearn, Buddhism is a way of life, and he is interested in the effects of its
doctrine upon the daily actions and common beliefs of ordinary people. Like

the Japanese themselves, he thinks of religion as something one does, not
merely as something one believes..." [24]

And in the same article, he went on to observe,

"Nothing could be less like the life of Jesus than that of the typical Christian,
clerical or lay,"

a statement which defines the basis of his view that San Francisco could most
flmdamentally provide an alternative, living culture in its contrast to the religious culture of
the rest of America in the post-war period

That religious culture, exemplified in the Protestant Church in America, had been a
"general failure," according to Rexroth, in terms of halting the erosion of ultimate values in
society. [25] Peter Berger has said that the churches of the post-war period were more
intent on propping up the "American way of life," than on proclaiming spiritual values that
opposed what America was coming to stand for. Berger writes,

"The new Protestantism validates the values ofan industrial society that has

become mature and settles down to consume happily what its huge economic

machine restlessly produces. The churches flmction in this new society as
the integators and propagators of a common cultural religion." [26]

According to Berger, this cultural religion mirrored the culture's denial of death and

"all visible signs of suffering and degadation" in order to "look upon the bright, daylight

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side of things" [27]. It was a culture of conformity and denial that possessed, for all
practical purposes, an establishment of religion in the post-war period that served as a
psychological support to the pursuit of leisure and wealth It was a religion that never
challenged the individual ultimate relationship to the mystery of the Other, and thus never
produced deep experiences of the traditional religious type.

Such a psychological, cultural religion that merely affirrned individuals in their
social roles and positions was not likely to satisfy the insurgent spirituality that has
historically risen up among the youth of each American generation. It was also not likely to
maintain even its function of providing a broad social cohesion through consensus, since it
denied the validity of transcendent experience as a social value. Thus, it was ultimately self-
defeating. In the Lafcadio Hearn article, Rexroth asserted,

"Philosophies and theologies come and go, but the gcup experience of

transcendence is embedded in human nature, and when it is abandoned,

theology, philosophy, and eventually culture, perish" [28]

The logical alternative to cultural Protestantism, and an altemative which indeed
sprang up in the 19505 and 19605 among large numbers of young people, was Zen
Buddhism, which was fed from three sources: the returning G.I.'s who had experienced
Asian culture while serving in the Pacific theater, the writings of such Zen populizers as
Daisetz Suzuki and Alan Watts, and the gowing Asian-American population, especially on
the West coast, that had brought with them, or carried down, inherited religious sensibilities.

Yet Rexroth also rejected most manifestations of American Zen, because of his

observation that it was often used as an excuse for social irresponsibility, and promoted a

spurious emphasis on visions (to be distinguished from "vision," which is always referred to
in the singular).

"They're trips that don't go anywhere. The measure of the defect of vision is

visions. And no Buddhist said that, St John of the Cross said that And the

more trips we have, the further away we're getting." [29]

In other words, the primary contemplative traditions merge around the claim that the
transcendent vision is ultimately an alternative way of looking at reality, not a way of
escaping it It is a realization that existing conditions are subject to dissolution by being part
of the organic process of the universe. To hold on to a static and inevitably despairing view
of reality reveals one's psychological dependency on it, and means one is held by illusion
and suffering, the very thing Buddhist practice was supposed to mitigate.

Therefore, as Zen in America many times reflected an existential despair in the face
of social realities, is was really only the minor image of the dominant American religiosity,
which blithely accepted social reality as the summum bonum. The logical political stance to
accompany Zen was a political anarchism that was based on a nihilism towards the value of
all institutions, and ultimately even of all social relationships. Yet this is again neither
alternative, nor truly religious in any traditional sense. Instead it is the mirror image of a
conformity that also despairs of creative individual acts of love within a social environment,
and seeks to avoid the contemplative vision that feeds such individuality along with its
extreme concomitant of social responsibility.

Contrary to both reactions towards an environment of despair Was Rexroth's belief,
based on longer-standing Buddhist traditions that reach back to the personality of

Sakyamlmi,

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"...that there is a community in the world, a community of love. It is a
community of contemplators. And the only reality is a perspective, but the
perspectives are infinite because the contemplators are infinite." [30]

The contemplators are not infinite in number, but in the scope of their vision. Vision
operates autonomously from all external authority, yet is the highest form of authority in and
of itself. It goes beyond anarchism in its political implications, since it offers freedom
within a heightened sense of social responsibility. And in the end, Rexroth believed, it
ofl‘ered the only hope for the continuance of human culture apart from its destructive '
elements, which are nonetheless ineradicable on any large scale.

"So the idea that a community of illlmrination and insight, can change the

world is an illusion But it can probably save it Because when the

contemplative life dies out the civilization dies with geat rapidity...When the

flame goes out, then there's nothing but darkness. But I don‘t think that this
can reform the world " [31]

So in contradistinction to both the dominant cultural religion in America, and its
supposed antidote in Zen, Rexroth again pointed towards deeper historical realities that
could be found within widely diverse cultures. The deepest thing that cultures have in
common, according to Rexroth's view, is that their health is directly related to the vitality of
the goup experience of transcendence within the culture, not just on an occasional basis, but
as the store ficm which the culture draws its perspectives on the reality it has to live within
on a daily basis. The force that drained this contemplative life out of the society was the
State in its modern form.

Thus an anarchism based on contemplation was the only real alternative to cultural
religion and Zen nihilism. They were both wrapped around and dependent on what Rexroth

called "the social lie," the consciousness of contingency when there was no contingency, the

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feeling of powerlessness when there was really no relevant power under which you were
held in bondage.

"A person who lives the Buddha life to the best of his ability does not need

the State and does not need law. That's a different thing from being a

political anarchist..Buddhism really isn't even passive resistance; it's

igloring the state, in all of its ways. It's igloring the social lie. " [32]

In the 19505, Rexroth believed that the poetry reading, communicating a poetry of
sacramental vision, and reinforcing individual values within a communal setting, was the
most powerful force in creating the cohesive relationships that could

allow an alternative culture to thrive, utterly detached from the destructive dynamics of the

social lie.

CHAPTER 3 NOTES

1. Peter Berger, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies: Christian Commitment and the
Religious Establishment in America (Garden City: Doubleday, 1961), 46.
2. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1960), 3.
3. Berger, 102.
4. Kenneth Rexroth, letter to Louis Zukovsky, 1931; Kenneth Rexroth Papers, ca. 1925-
1979. (Collection 175). Department of Special Collections, University Research Library,
Univresity of California, Los Angeles.
5. Richard Crossman, ed, The God That Failed (New York: Harper & Row,
1949), 16.
6. Henry J. Silverman, ed, American Radical Thought: The Libertarian Tradition
(Lexington, Massachusetts: D. C. Heath and Company, 1970), 173.
7. Emile Capouya and Kietna Tompkins, eds., The Essential Kropotkin (New York:
Liveright, 1975), 170.
8. Silverman, 194-195.
9. Ibid, 174.
10. Ibid, 175.
11. Rexroth, More Classics Revisited, ed. by Bradford Morrow (New York: New
Directions, 1989), 128.
12. Ibid, 128.
13. David Meltzer, Golden Gate: Interviews with 5 San Francisco Poets
(Berkeley: Wingbow Press, 1976), 23.
14. Ibid, 24.
15. Ibid, 26.
16. Herbert Read, Anarchy and Order: Essays in Politics (London: Faber and
Faber, 1954), 35.
17. Geoffrey Ostergaard, Latter-Day Anarchism: The Politics of the American Beat
Generation (Harold Laski Institute of Political Science, 1964), 17.
18. Lionel Trilling, "The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters", The Opposing Self: Nine
Essays in Criticism (New York: Viking Press, 1955), 47.
19. Philip Rahv, "Religion and the lntellectuals," Literature and the Sixth Sense
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969), 170-171.
20. Rexroth, "Morals, Ethics, Religion, Ideology, The Poet, Poetry," The Alternative
Society: Essays fi-om the Other World (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 19.
21. Read, 45.
22. George Woodcock, "Rage and Serenity: The Poetic Politics of Kenneth
Rexroth," (Sagetrieb, Winter 1983), 75.
23. Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre: The Poem, The Poetic Revelation, Poetry and
History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973), 139.
24. Rexroth, "Lafcadio Heam and Buddhism," World Outside the Window: The Selected
Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New Directions, 1987), 308.
25. Rexroth, "Cathedral Windows Address," (UCLA Special Collections)

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26. Berger, 50.

27. Ibid, 48.

28. Rexroth, "Lafcadio Heam and Buddhism," World Outside the Window, 309.

29. Carole Tonkinson, ed, Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation (New
York: Riverhead Books, 1995), 341.

30. Ibid, 342.

31. Ibid, 345.

32. Ibid, 337.

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CHAPTER 4: KENNETH REXROTH AND THE "REGIONAL IMPERATIVES"
OF THE SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE

"In Rexroth the tenets of Modernism and Experimental ism are much more
crucially employed than in Steinbeck or Saroyan. An awesome erudition,
a powerful nostalgiac sense of history which infuses much of his mood
with a tragic classicism, it is nevertheless always the Californian earth
and sky and sea that form the vital imagery infusing his verse with its
power. In him the Western expansion casts over history as well as space. "
(William Everson, Archetype West, pp. 103-104)

In his autobiographical writings, Kenneth Rexroth nurtured a personal mythology
in which he saw himself as the catalyst for the merging of San Francisco's history of
radicalism with a modernist aesthetic sensibility. He portrayed San Francisco in the
19205 as a fervent labor town, one that was possibly even sympathetic to communalist
forms of social organization, but still a city that found no support for these progressive
sentiments in its artists and writers, who were largely extenuating a nineteenth century
cultural sensibility with its accompanying models of literary expression.

Whether Rexroth was alone, or even dominant, in the process that culminated in
the Six Gallery reading is difficult to ascertain. Jack London's stories can be interpreted
as fables of a new modern reality emerging in the West, while Dashiell Hammett's Sam
Spade also could be seen as emblematic of San Francisco as a modern city of fragnented
hopes and unsentimental expression. Yet, as this chapter will illustrate, it is difficult to
see how Rexroth was not a primary factor in creating the atmosphere in which an
audience half-comprised of carpenters and dockworkers would attend a flee-wheeling

poetry reading on an October night in 1955.

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As Kevin Starr ably demonstrates in his study of Depression-era California, the
Bay area had, from the time of the Gold Rush, been a starkly polarized region politically.
There were radicals and reactionaries, and very little in between And by the mid-19305,
less than a decade after Rexroth's arrival, it was pretty clear that radicalism had gained
the ascendent position [1]. Both homegrown, and arriviste, writers from the East found
much to be attracted to in San Francisco's dramatic legacy of radical action and
courageous polemic. And in a city that glorified its Wobbly martyrs and General
Strikers, there was little to attract those who sympathized with moderation and a politics
of the status quo.

To envision literature, and even something seemingly so benigl as a poetry
reading, as contributing to the furtherance of that radical legacy required a peculiar type
of West-coast modernism. Kenneth Rexroth supplied the vision and cultural experience

that would enable that modernism to emerge.

REXROTH AND THE WESTERN ARCHETYPE
In his eccentric critical study of the emergence of a Western archetype in the
literature of California, and especially of the San Francisco area from Richard Henry
Dana onward, poet William Everson centers on Rexroth as the key Western literary
figure of the mid-twentieth century due to his "focus [of] the archetype, now definitely
constellated, into an explicably formulated literary movement.” Everson identifies the
five aspects of this archetype as (l) pantheism as the characteristic American religious

and aesthetic feeling, (2) a democratic state of existence, (3) cultural apotheosis, (4)

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violence as a positive value, and (5) the encounter with nature (or Emersonian Nature) in
its vastness. [2]

Eventually Everson adds that the San Francisco renaissance helped to concretize a
sixth element of the archetype -- a participation mystique in which the ubiquitous poetry
reading was the latest symbol. In an interview with John Tritica, Everson went on to
claim that Rexroth's timely synthesis of the archetype into an organized aesthetic
movement was the substance of his role as a "father figure" to the San Francisco
renaissance. [3]

As a mystic, anarchist, radical, nature poet, and theoretician of the poetry and jazz
movement, Rexroth would certainly seem to embody at least one possible synthesis of the
archetype, but one more element was needed to allow him to become the energizing force
behind the movement. This element has to do with the fact that Rexroth was not a native
Californian himself.

According to Everson's historical mythologizing of the San Francisco renaissance,
the key event which pointed towards its eventuality was Rexroth's decision to go west
instead remaining in Chicago or going east in 1927. Rexroth biogapher, Linda
Hamalian, tentatively concurs when she writes that

"...Rexroth was untempted by the magic of Gotham. For all his

sophistication and savoir-faire, he did not want to settle in a city

dominated by European culture and tradition, no matter how well he had

learned that literature and art. Chicago would remain a special place for

him because it was the prototypical ‘American‘ city; and he was always

ready to talk about his days at the Green Mask and the Dill Pickle [places

where he first read poetry to jazz with Langston Hughes], or soapboxing

in Bug House Square and West Madison Street. But Rexroth saw no

future for himself in Chicago and persuaded Andree [his first wife] that
the West Coast would provide them with a better opportunity to succeed

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as artists. He had already discovered that he was most at peace in the

mountains of the Northwest. His decision to move west instead of east

would have far-reaching consequences: for his poetry, his push for

recogrition, his politics, and his influence on the American literary

conscience." [4]

Though it may feed into a personal mythology just as intricate as Everson's
archetypal sense of region, Rexroth himself supplied a folksy version of his motives for
both coming to, and remaining in, San Francisco. As he told David Meltzer in the late
1960's,

"We just didn't have any competition. It was like Picasso dropping back

into the world of Trollope. The leading painter in town, Maynard Dixon,

came over to see me and looked at my paintings on the wall and said,

‘Hmmmm, I see you have been experimentin' with abstract form, like

Matissy and Picassio!‘ So, it was a great place, you know, because there
wasn't any sweat. That's why we came to San Francisco." [5]

In this quotation one gains a clue to Rexroth's sense of himself as someone who
introduced an avant-garde, or modernist, consciousness (comparing himself to Picasso)
into a provincial, in-gown environment (the "world of Trollope"). In the same interview
with Meltzer, he claimed that by 1969 (the year after he broke his forty-year residence in
the city to take a teaching position in Santa Barbara) San Francisco had undeniably
become the center of world culture. [6] His role in that grand transformation was not so
subtly implied.

Though I suppose there could be an element of projection in Everson's narrative
regarding Rexroth's role, since he often indicated his personal indebtedness to Rexroth
for bringing him to San Francisco from the Waldport conscientious-objectors camp in
1945 and fostering his development as a young poet, his perspective may in fact confirm

Rexroth's seemingly self-drarnatizing account on a deeper level. A

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Everson reveals his sense of the mechanism by which Rexroth became central by
characterizing him as both a Modernist intellectual and a true westemer in his sense of
unity with the landscape and the region's radical history. His centrality was due not
simply to the fact that Rexroth presented the city's artists and writers with an antitype to
its own provincialism and lack of intellectual energy. It was that he integated his avant-
garde consciousness, indeed found its proper subj ect, in the geogaphy and history of
northern California. In other words, as an initial outsider, Rexroth recognized more
clearly than any of its native citizens that San Francisco had the potential to nurture an
internationally significant literary movement and a social environment based on humane
values and geographical factors. An American sensitivity to nature, along with traditions
of cultural plurality and radical democracy, could find their apotheosis there, creating
new American meanings and expressions, while breaking down inherited provincial
attitudes. Like Paris in the 1920's, San Francisco could become a truly international city,
only more so because of the Asian cultural element and because of America's new
centrality on the world stage.

He brought to the fore the fact that experimentalism in the arts occurred within
neither a cultural nor geographic vacuum. Even, or especially, avant-gardism in the arts
had to gow out of the artist's consciousness of his organic involvement in the place of his
life's daily rhythms. This did not imply the negation of imagination, only the necessity
for it to be disciplined within a consciousness of how history's problems and the
limitations of nature coalesced within the artist's own life. Correlatively, this was the

only basis for a relevant literary radicalism. Anything else, by virtue of being

-106-

disconnected from a sense of dailiness and geographical fixedness, was liable to
transmogrify into an easy universalism, a dogna, an ideology, which of necessity were
always at least somewhat false to every particular occasion.

The force of the clash between potential and history, imagination and nature, fate
and will, played out again and again throughout the history of American culture, was to
reach a culminating intensity in Rexroth's San Francisco. The most important historical
question that hung in the balance was whether, as had happened in other locales, the clash
between sustaining traditions and insurgent radicalisms would disintegrate all creative
tendencies, or whether in this "end of the trail" place, a culture could be formed in the
fusion, integation or possible transcendence of these forces. Needless to say, it was a tall
order. Only a social consciousness steeped in historical traditions and archetypes, yet
open to genuine experimentation in all areas of culture, could hope to pull it off. This
was in fact the central meaning of Rexroth's modernism, a modernism that, in its motive
of clearing away the encnrstations of custom and commercial values that had overlaid
and choked off the vital potentials of the culture, was an antidote to existential despair.

As a rebel against the extremisms of Puritan-Yankee values, Rexroth naturally
acceded to Thoreau's dictum that America's future lay in "wild-ness," but tempered that
observation (as Thoreau also did upon confi'onting Mt. Katahdin) by not denying the
value of the specifically human, or even of the classically cultured sensibility, as the
crucial mediator of that wildness. The alternative was to be overwhelmed and silenced,
or to turn away from reality through interiorizing metaphysical stances or various

disconnections of the self fi'om history. On the other hand, if civilized social values were

~107-

not mediated by a sense of their connection to a vast, yet organic, wildness, they quickly
turned artificial and coercive. Rexroth believed it was the poet's function to model this
dual mediation both in his life and work, and the most likely place for the poet to be able
to do this would be where the sense of wildness, freedom and radical energy had not been
diluted by over-civilization. A section of the poem "Past and Future Turn About" reveal
his sense that redemption towards love and life-sustaining values are not to be found in
the Apollonian ideal.

It is easy to read or write
In a book, "Self-realization

. Is responsible self-sacrifice."

"The will to power, the will to live,
Are fulfilled by transfiguration. "

"The person is the final value;

Value is responsibility."

As the world sinks in a marsh of blood,
You won't raise yourself by your bootstraps,
However pious and profound.

Christ was not born of Socrates,

But to a disorderly people,

In an evil time, in the flesh

Of innocence and humility. [7]

William Everson, who more than anyone else consciously attempted to be the
quintessential modern poet of the American west, recognized that while Robinson J effers
with his "inhumanist" aesthetic could represent for him the "pure" utilization of the
western muse, Rexroth provided a way for the poet to, in a sense, center the will outside
the landscape and integrate a Modernist aesthetic stance and a radical political
commitment witha mediating sense of historical, social, and intellectual responsibility
[8]. Although Jeffers may have been justified in conflating California's topogaphy and

sheer physical awesomeness with a metaphysical negation of the human self, Rexroth

~108-

was equally justified in conflating the metaphysical suggestiveness of the geography with
the possibility of a deep and heroic renewal, not just of literature, but of Western culture's
promise. Each perspective simply located the opposite poles on the spectrum of possible
futures.

Everson hinted at this distinction in a reference to the Irish critic Denis
Donoghue's observation that "in one of the recurrent moments of American literature the
imagination confronts reality in the guise of a poet gazing at the sea. " Everson comments
that "Jeffers made that moment his abiding stance, but Rexroth assimilate(d) to it the
wealth of intellectual preoccupations deriving from our European heritage." [9] In other
words, Rexroth continually tried to plant that moment within a continuing historical
context Poem after poem illustrates this, but "Gentlemen, I Address You Publicly" very
chillingly depicts the ultimate flowing out of the absurd human drama into the vast ebbs
and flow of nature, unchecked in a sort of quiet and serene brutality, if not woken up to
through a flash of recoglition, which the end of the poem sees as still possible, even
probable. He is saying that human and inhuman nature, though in organic relationship to
one another, do not have to necessarily only meet on the plane of death and dissolution.
They will one day get there, but that day can be delayed if only someone would wake up.
They said no one would ever care
They said it would never make any difference
And afier the years of waiting
I didn't it hadn't mattered originally
It didn't matter then
But why do they stand so
Why do they never go
What are they waiting for

What monstrous new planet
Glowing in a cloud of omen

~109-

Must appear poised on their red-hot alps
And now bolting from sleep

And unbelieving hearing

In the night echoing and reechoing

The glaciers walking on the midnight
Recurrent smashing of a train wreck

But nobody knows now

They said there were many

Before the wars

Now nobody cares

This knife is guarenteed to float on water

It's made for you take it it's yours

As you lie under the rocking stars on the organic
Vertiginous lifi of the ocean

It will float out chill and sly

Creeping under the sternum in an inexplicable
Shiver nothing much will happen

The eyes half—open the hair floating

The starlight glittering on the moist teeth
They will remain the same

Only the heart and lungs will stop

But the breast will go on rising

Falling with the undulant ocean

Each night thereafter the corpuscular
Animation of the sea will shine more thickly
Until at last

Aureate and upright

Walking waist deep on the breaking combers
Some one screaming sees it from a boat [10]

To reiterate, for Rexroth, California meant a place where inhuman wildness and

human (or humane) civilization would not have to participate in a zero-sum game, but

could finally enter into a fi'uitful dialectic, the human and the inhuman achieving their

higher organic relations. According to the mythology of place Rexroth developed, if it

couldn't happen in California, it couldn't happen in America and, moreover, would not be

passed on to subsequent generations. Yet the sense of permanence he found in the

California landscape and elements, an enduring solidity to nature's organic expression of

-110-

itself through a place in contrast to the vertiginous changes in the personal history of a
man, filled Rexroth with a deep hopefulness, rather than a sense of elegaic loss - even in
the face of personal mortality and ruin.

Hi5 poem, "A Living Pearl," [11] expresses this complex hope that was fed by his
life as a westemer. He begins the poem with a description of his crucial adolescent

entrance into the workaday rhythms of the archetypal west.

At sixteen I came West, riding

F reights on the Chicago, Milwaukee
And St Paul, the Great Northern,
The Northern Pacific. I got

A job as helper to a man

Who gathered wild horses in the
Mass drives in the Okanogan

And Horse Heaven country. The best
We culled out as part profit from
The drive, the rest went for chicken
And dog feed. We took thirty head
Up the Methow, up the Twisp,
Across the headwaters of Lake
Chelan, down the Skagit to

The Puget Sound country. I

Did the cooking and camp work.

In a couple of weeks I

Could handle the stock pretty well.
Every day we saddled and rode

A new horse. Next day we put a
Packsaddle on him. By the

Time we reached Marblemount

We considered them well broken.
The scissorbills who bought them
Considered them untamed mustangs
Of the desert. In a few weeks

They were peacefully pulling

Milk wagons in Sedro-Wooley.

We made three trips a season

And did well enough for the
Post-war depression.

~111-

Then he jumps to the present, musing on how the essential experience of the west
is as unchanging, and as fruitful of meditation, as a sun-forged diamond, because the

experience itself is coiled within the organic realities of the place. It is a continual
archetypal journey.

Tonight,

Thirty years later, I walk

Out of the deserted miner's

Cabin in Mono Pass, under

The full moon and the few large stars.
The sidehills are piebald with snow.
The midnight air is suffused

With moonlight. As Dante says,

"It is though a cloud enclosed

Me, lucid, dense, solid, polished,
Like a diamond forged by the sun.
We entered the eternal pearl,
Which took us as water takes

A ray of light, itself unclefi."

F ifieen years ago, in this place,

I wrote a poem called "Toward

An Organic Philosophy."
Everything is still the same,

And it differs very little

From the first mountain pass I
Crossed so long ago with the
Pintos and zebra duns and
Glmmetal roans and buckskins,
And splattered lallapaloosas,

The stocky wild ponies whose
Ancestors came with Coronado.
There are no horse bells tonight,
Only the singing of frogs

In the snow-wet meadows, the shrill
Single bark of a mountain

Fox, high in the rocks where the
Wild sheep move silently through the
Crystal moonlight.

-112-

And then in an epiphany that helps to explain why William Everson said that San
Francisco was not ready for a renaissance until it realized itself as "opposition" [12],
rather than extension, Rexroth explores the source of the West's alternative spatial (and
thus conceptual) enduring realities, knowing that it can only be carried forward on the
human plane through the replenishment that comes as the fruit of human relationships. It
is here that finiteness gasps its relation to the infinite.

The same feelings

Come back. Once more all the awe
Of a boy from the prairies where
Lanterns move through the comfortable
Dark, along a fence, through a field,
Home; all the thrill of youth
Suddenly come from the flat
Geometrical streets of

Chicago, into the illimitable

And inhuman waste places

Of the Far West, where the mind finds
Again the forms Pythagoras

Sought, the organic relations

Of stone and cloud and flower

And moving planet and falling
Water. Marthe and Mary sleep

In their down bags, cocoons of
Mutual love. Half my life has

Been passed in the West, much of it
On the gound beside lonely fires
Under the summer stars, and in
Cabins where the snow drifted through
The pines and over the roof.

I will not camp here as often

As I have before. Thirty years

Will never come for me again.

"Our campfire dies out in the

Lonely mountains. The transparent
Moonlight stretches a thousand miles.
The clear peace is without end."

My daughter's deep blue eyes sleep
In the moon shadow. Next week

-ll3-

She will be one year old.

Human culture was an anomoly if it did not somehow comprehend itself as part of
this organic process. No strain need be involved, only simple recognition. Yet in
seeming obeisance to the archetype (and perhaps out of sense of Buddhist realism),
Rexroth felt that the process of cultural renewal would involve conflict, personal risk, and
perhaps even hinge on who was the "quickest draw" in the polemical battle over the new
literature and its cultural meaning.

Californians themselves had historically been both willing to embrace the
suggestions of utopia their region furnished, while simultaneously leaving themselves
open to charges of childishness and irresponsibility. Historian Keven Starr has made the
observation:

"At its most compelling, California could be a moral premise, a

prescription for what America could and should be. At its most trivial it

was a cluster of shallow dreams, venial hankerings which mistook laziness

for leisure, selfishness for individualism, laxity for liberation, evasion and

cheap escape for redemption and a solid second chance. All of it -

ideality and possible disaster - was set in motion in the early travel

literature, because from the first it was fundamental to the experience,

somehow part of the region's imperatives. Good or bad, California never

came easy - or without divided meaning. " [13]

In a later chapter on Rexroth and the Beats, I will explore how this distinctly
Californian co-existence of what might be called "moral avant-gardism" with an
individualism bordering on self-delusion would threaten to blow apart the San Francisco
renaissance, but in the context of "regional imperatives" I would like to examine
Rexroth's strategies as an intellectual and regional icon in creating a certain oppositional

identity for San Francisco's literary community. That identity would draw on Modernism

-114-

and the region's physical exuberance to obviate delusions about the self and reality, and
to push the movement beyond triviality or nostalgia. For Rexroth, and Everson, survival
meant apotheosis, or it wasn't the West.

Along with infusing a Modernist sensibility into San Francisco culture, and
performing one possible synthesis of the historical archetype, Rexroth's strategies
involved an intensification of regional consciousness by bringing polemics to bear on
what he saw as the elite academicism, reactionary provincialism, and political
obscurantism of the Eastern literary culture. He gave the renaissance an anarchistic,
rhetorically violent western face through his historically peculiar, yet highly
sophisticated, critique of what he began to call the "Literary Establishment," a term which

acquired many of its present American connotations within this Rexrothian mileau.

POLEMICS AND STRATEGIES

In the 19505 it was still possible for Kenneth Rexroth to envision San Francisco as
a place where a truly alternative culture could gow and thrive. At a time when
technological efficiency had not yet rendered geogaphy relatively meaningless, it was
over three thousand miles from New York City, which at the time represented the apex of
what America was beginning to symbolize to the rest of the world -- power, wealth, and
an arrogant naivete. To borrow a term from the Marxist critic Raymond Williams, if
New York City represented cultural hegemony, than to Rexroth San Francisco
represented the last outpost of resistance, the last place where alternative values and

experiences could be communicated and find innocent embodiment. It was also possibly

-115-

the last place where a literary movement might be financially subsistent apart from what
Richard Kostelanetz has called the "nationalizing effect" [14] of New York's mainstream
publishing industry, while also entering significantly into the international literary avant-
garde.

' Though Rexroth sometimes envied the powers of cultural dissemination New
York employed, there could be no compromise, at least in the realm of polemics, with an
industry that was enthralled to a small literary elite, that was largely blind to its own
provincialism, and that was increasingly encouraging towards a politics of accomodation.
To Rexroth, who saw it as a simple empirical fact that the literature and literary criticism
of a culture mirrored its spectrum of values, all of these factors contributed to the cultural
disintegation of mainstream American culture, and implied the rejection of truly
sustaining human values.

The alternative values that Rexroth invoked as the basis for an alternative west
coast literary establishment involved the attitude that knowledge was a form both of love
and responsibility between persons, that potential human interrelationships ran deeper
than national or racial distinctions, and that the "Social Lie"- the "American Way of
Life" and the pervasive illusion that those in power worked for the ultimate good of
others and not themselves - had to be resisted absolutely.

These convictions gave emotional substance to his symbolic critique of the East
Coast literary establishment, and led towards his laying upon poetry the cultural burden

of being the basis for the alternative culture's identity. It led also towards the corollary

- 116-

conviction that a poetry renaissance would be, almost by definition, a cultural renaissance
in the broadest sense.

William Everson has surmised that if the San Francisco poets of the post-war
period can truly be seen as a group, the only thing that held them together was their
struggle with the “East Coast Literary Establishment” [15]. Of course this did not mean
that San Francisco poets were anti-intellectual or that they did not have a firm grasp of
literary history. There were few, if any, poets in America in .1950 who were as well-read
as Kenneth Rexroth and his Berkeley counterpart, Robert Duncan. In fact, a large part of
Rexroth's critique of the “Eastem Establishment,” and especially of the New Critics who
idolized TS. Eliot, was directed towards the narrowness of their literary purview, a
narrowness that made them vulnerable to the romance of right-wing ideologies and to
various forms of sentimental cultural conservatisms.

In this he saw them as failing to advance beyond the intellectual horizons of Eliot,
and also, to a certain extent, Ezra Pound. Whether fair or not, Rexroth said that his
primary problem with Eliot was that he simply did not read enough books. Of course, the
real charge was, more specifically, that Eliot did not read from a sufficiently wide variety
of literatures and was especially ethnocentric towards the Asian classics. James Laughlin
used to tell the story of how he relayed to Eliot Rexroth's concerns about two Chinese
characters in the Cantos that were upside down. Eliot laughed it off, saying nobody
cared about such things. To be sure, Eliot never lived near Chinatown

As far as Pound, an elderly Rexroth once dressed down an interviewer who

complained about the excessive esotericism of Pound's reading list in ABC of Reading by

-117-

saying that he had read and assimilated all those books by the time he was fifteen years
old [16] The important point is not whether Rexroth was exaggerating, but that he
considered the mastery of such works to be basic, rather than esoteric. Keeping in mind
the comparable literary and cultural knowledge of such poets as Robert Duncan and Gary
Snyder, the more convincing charge to level against the major San Francisco poets might
be that they were overly bookish, rather than anti-intellectual.

Hence, the critique made principally by Rexroth in regards to the New Critics,
Agarians, and New York Jewish intellectuals like Lionel Triling and Leslie Fiedler was
not, in substance, a critique of intellectualism per se, but of a perceived "ethocentric",
"self-important" and "despairing" intellectualism that found its expression in a self-
enclosed academic elitism and a narrow canonical literary criticism that sometimes
seemed like no more than a variation on New England ecclesiasticalism. Stanley
Bumshaw foreshadowed this aspect of the cultural critique, and revealed its basis in a
radical social mentality, in a poem published in The New Masses in 1934, entitled "Mr.
Tubbe's Morning Service."

The priceless Mr. Waldo Tubbe
And all his little Tubbes now dare

Approach the world they long to snub,
Well insulated with despair.

Their ancient sage prepares to speak
In holy numbers presto-pronto:
Fused Hindu-Latin-Chinese-Greek
The special Tubbey esperanto.

Whereon each pupil makes a wish
And Bishop Tubbe prepares to drool
A priceless strain of gibberish
Concocted in the learned school.

-118-

While all the little Tubbes let pass
Secretions of orgasmic glee.

Tubbe father empties out a glass

of quintessential poesy

Compounded by rare formulae

Of liquid siftings, while Laforgue's
And ghosts of other live men die

Once more in the scholastic morgues....
For he will find them magic toys --
This wizard of the cult, Despair -

Blinders for all his tender boys,
Protective from what's in the air. [17]

This parodic homage to TS. Eliot is not anti-intellectual, but is particularly
American, and especially western, in its ridicule of self-importance, artificial ritual, over-
refinement, and lack of spirit. It is not primarily a parody of a particular type of '
literature, or even of TS. Eliot as a writer. Instead, it is ridiculing a literary culture that
declared its indebtedness to Eliot while producing a literature of unalloyed
pretentiousness and cloistered sensibility rather than of insurgent avant-gardism and
personal conviction

Not that anyone could produce a Wasteland, but the writers and critics that
Bumshaw had in mind fell short of even operating in the same mode; instead of
following in Eliot's footsteps by producing a literature that in some way implied risk in
confrontation between the writer's consciousness and the world, it was a literature that
did not do anything besides present itself as an object of analysis, and of a very
specialized and carefully nurtured type of analysis, one that could be learned only in the

classroom of the New Critic professor-poet. Rexroth indicates the disconnection of such

-ll9-

narrow specialization from the outside world, and from the traditions it claims to
continue, when he writes,

"I am, amongst other things, a poet. My poetry is work. I write it to lay

hands on an obdurate world, to make love to women and to overthrow the

State, the Church and the Capitalist System. I do not write it to get it

analyzed in a seminar and neither did John Donne or Arthur Rimbaud. "

[18]

Conversely, in restricting themselves to a self-enclosed literary universe, the Eliot
disciples revealed their complicity with a culture that Rexroth also saw as aberrant by
virtue of its pervasive artificiality. Though the New Critics, neo-Agarians, and New
York intellectuals ultimately saw themselves as embodying a moral opposition to the
dominant American culture through stances of intellectual objectivity, Rexroth saw them
as existing in an otherworldly symbiotic relationship mirroring the intricately controlled,
yet portentiously sinister, worlds of contemporary science fiction. Solely because of its
increasing dominance in the culture and potential danger to poetry's real development
going on elsewhere did it inevitably bring about wide-spread counter-reaction. Rexroth
had a geat faith in poetry's ability to survive in and through even the darkest of cultural
epochs.

"...in periods when the culture values artificiality, the lyric becomes

stereotyped Then, after awhile, the poets revolt and, usually turning to

folk origins, restore to lyric poetry at least the appearance of naturalness

and spontaneity." [19]

In his introduction to the anthology he edited, Revolution of the Word, Jerome
Rothenberg presents an "un-official" history of American poetry in the twentieth century,
showing how a vital tradition of experimentation lived on despite the seeming hegemony

of the TS. Eliot-criticism school of "responsible modernism" [20]. He also touches on

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the interplay between American and European avant-gardes during this period, implying
that the discourse went on entirely outside the experience of the "responsible
Modernists." David Antin, a San Francisco-based poet, has ageed by pointing out that it
is a curious state of affairs when a poet like W.D. Snodgrass can see himself in the Eliotic
line and writing in the idiom of Pound, with lines that reek of artificiality like

The geen catalpa tree has turned

All white; the cherry blooms once more.

In one whole year I haven't learned

A blessed thing they pay you for. [21]

Obviously, something strangehad happened to the modernist legacy, or at least in
one development of it. But to get a closer understanding of Rexroth's modernism, and
how it became linked to an ecological consciousness in California, it is necessary to
return, if possible, to a common point of departure for those poets who belonged to a later
generation than the primary modernists who would increasingly become critically linked
with a new post-modem American poetry. I believe that point of departure, though, may
be found in an examination of the common debt they all felt they owed to the primary
American modemists.

Thomas Parkinson has observed that Rexroth was of the generation that followed
on the heels of the geat modernist experiments of Stevens, Eliot, Pound and Williams.
In terms of influence on the development of American poetry, these are the figures
named most prominently in the essays of post-World War II poets. Robert Frost,
Marianne Moore, BB. Cummings and Hart Crane are generally accorded a secondary

position of influence, though of course there were certain poets, such as Randall Jarrell

with his prioritization of Frost, who expressed a deep debt to one of these in preference to

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any of the four. And Walt Whitman in some ways stands in the background of all
subsequent American poetry, though it would be a stretch to call him a modernist because
of the different world he was a part of. It is also clear that many important post-war poets
valiantly attempted to conceptualize their work as a direct contradiction to Whitman's
influence.

Rexroth, though, is most accurately considered as an intergenerational writer, not
only in age but in the way he conceived his identity as a writer and critic. By age, he was
more specifically of the critically maligned generation that was swallowed up in radical
causes and New Deal policies during "their most important years of poetic development,
who came out of the thirties politicized yet left with little hope for establishing a true
reciprocal relationship between literature and politics. This caused there to be more of a
direct aesthetic line of influence between the post-World War I modernists and the post-
World War II "post-modernists," than between the proletarian generation and the post-
war youth.

The primary New Critics like John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Donald
Davidson, along with certain New York intellectuals like Lionel Trilling and Philip Rahv,
must also be placed chronologically within this inter-war generation, following the
seminal early work of the modernists, yet, in retrospect, creating works that are defined
by the social and political agendas of the thirties in a way that separated them from the
comparatively apolitical post-war youth

Those who were a part of this interwar generation were partly contemporaneous

with the modernists and were able to respond to them before they were accorded

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canonical status; thus they were able to effect the process of literary assimilation to a
certain extent. In their reading of the great works of the modernist period as they came
out, and not initially in the classroom, their reactions were fresh and were shaped by
similar experiences to those of the writers themselves. In other words, the future of these
works was more malleable then, and their initial influence was largely lefl in the hands of
young writers like Rexroth, Allen Tate, Philip Rahv, and a fairly small number of others
who would try to discern their importance within rapidly changing cultural
circumstances.

One of the crucial experiences of this generation seems to have been an encounter
with TS. Eliot's The Wasteland at an impressionable age. It was virtually impossible for
any budding literary artist who was born around the turn of the century to avoid its
influence. Pound's Cantos would have a powerful incremental effect over time, and Hart
Crane's The Bridge had its own particular fervent audience, but The Wasteland was
unique. Perhaps to even a geater extent than Ginsberg's Howl, it was received as the
representative voice of a literary epoch, whether the poem was understood or not. But
the inability to be precise about its meanings was, of course, a large part of its charm.
Rexroth describes his own reaction in his Autobiographical Novel:

"About this time The Waste Land came out. Just prior to its appearance

Ruth (his girlfriend of the time) had been taking a course from Edward

Sapir, and we were full of The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston and Jane

Harrison and Comford and Gilbert Murray and all the rest of them. One

day I stopped in at Marshall Field's and bought a copy of The Dial and met

Ruth at Washington Park and we walked across to the Midway and over to

the University. We stopped off in the park near a bed of tulips - I can see

them very clearly, yellow tulips with red stripes - and we sat down on the

gas and I opened The Dial, and there was The Waste Land. For the rest
of the trip across the park we were only half-conscious. It's hard to

-123-

convey to anyone today the impact of that poem on someone young and
full of ideas when it came out. Everyone reads it today prepared for it--it's
The Waste Land, you've heard about it in grammar school and even once
in awhile in the newspapers - but this was just another issue of The Dial.
There was no preparation for it whatsoever. Now, the remarkable thing
about The Waste Land was that we all thought it was a revolutionary
poem. Either in The Dial or in the notes that came out a couple of years
later, Eliot speaks of the moral collapse of civilization in Eastern Europe.
We thought this was a typographical error for Western Europe. The
dissociative style, borrowed from Apollinaire, seemed to us revolutionary,
and the picture of decay -- of course, it was Western Civilization - was so
overpowering that it seemed to be a revolutionary rather than a reactionary
indictment." [22]

Soon thereafter, Rexroth would write "Phronesis," which is, on the surface, a
spoof of The Wasteland. But the poem can also be seen to have the serious purpose of
allowing Rexroth to situate himself within the literary atmosphere Eliot's poem created.
As such, the ultimate intent of the poem is highly ambiguous. Even the title is taken fiom
a Greek word that can mean either arrogance or thoughtfulness, depending on the
context. It is written in a seeming parody of the Eliot idiom,

And now old mammal, gall

He asked a question

He near and far asking

He said I must start at a place I remember and
try and recall

Fill that tube with blood and hold it to the light
you will speedily see what was intended.

And what was discovered.

Of course certain rays won't penetrate.
Running a knife along the white edge of this cloister
avoiding the crevices avoiding the results.
Void and void. [23]

Yet the poem also could be intending to give a tone of obviousness to the Eliotic
cultural diagnosis (it is what thinking people think about when they think), while

negating through parody a tone that had allowed a response of spiritual nihilism and

~124-

historical pessimism to seem appropriate. Despite The Wastelands somewhat scholarly
reference to vegetative cycles, it falls short of representing a fully organic view of history
of the type that Rexroth was slowly developing at this time. It was still tied to simplistic
assumptions of progessive linearity, and it implicitly required an heroic return to the
vital pre-technological sources in the past for a reinvigoration of the present.

As explained in the previous chapter, Rexroth came to view eras of the past as
essentially indivisible from all the factors that created them in their totality. Past
societies thrived and died over time, and although values contributing to their health and
disease were carried over into subsequent civilizations, these elements could not be
arbitrarily abstracted from the past and applied, almost medicinally, to present crises.
The separation between thought and action, between spiritual and social realities implied
in this assumption of applicability was itself a symptom of the larger problem.

In this sense, Rexroth's developing "philosophy" (or anti-philosophy) of history
attempted to embrace a more comprehensive, meta-critical view that saw both the virtues
and the problems of the past still integrally existing in the present within forms that are
shaped by contemporary exigencies. It is simply wishful - and ultimately nihilistic -
thinking to see the history of culture as a series of boxes out of which one can pick and
choose to produce a more satisfying cultural arrangement in the present.

It must be admitted that Eliot himself, at the time, was a bit ambiguous in his own
thinking in regards to how those factors creating spiritual (or in Rexroth's terms, organic)

health in the past could be appropriated within a modern context.

-125-

Indeed, that arnbiguity was one of the raison d'etres of modernism. But without
descending into determinism, Rexroth preferred to realistically and unsentimentally
consider the way in which the present situation has been inalterably shaped by the past,
how present fragnentation was born in the seedbeds of past philosophies, technologies,
economies and political decisions. He agreed with Marx that there seemed to be a form
to this flow of history that could be analyzed in a scientific way, yet he transcended both
the Marxist analytic and the fragnented Modernist aesthetic sense of reality by viewing
the history of cultures as ultimately a single organism which nonetheless can be see to be
in flux due to the almost infinite multiplicity of cultural forms.

Thus, out of a merged realism and mysticism, Rexroth sets the basis for a poetic
of both diaglosis and proglosis. Eliot remained important in that, in one of the most
fi'uitful uses of Pound's imagism, he showed that a presentation of present cultural
realities could be made within an avant-garde idiom, that that could be one of the primary
functions of the avant-garde. Yet Eliot's poem represented the accomplishment of a

lesser ideal for poetry than Rexroth envisioned, and by falling short it really was
distasteful to him in its ultimate effect. Not only did it, through a rigid logic, feed into
reactionary social and political visions, but it failed to even point towards the possibility
of cultural reintegration that a fully organic view entailed Rexroth concluded
"Phronesis" with a rather prosaic summation of this organic view, conceptualized through
the metaphor of a "celestial sphere."

"Here one must apply a different standard. These forms are not measured

by time, for time is the clocking of motion, the comparison of one motion

with another, but by the aeon, aevurn, which is the form of their relation,
extraperipetal, to the celestial sphere. The internal relations of the

-126-

celestial sphere are, viewed as a whole, simultaneous. From unique points
within its manifold motion arises from the reference of any one point or
finite system of points to the sum of their relations." [24]

The foregoing analysis of Rexroth's reaction to Eliot's The Wasteland shows that
Rexroth's relationship to the symbols of Eastern civilization and mentality began in an
intense ambiguity that was rich enough to continue to effect his identity as a western
literary figure. In the 19305 this ambiguity was maintained in his relations with the
Communist Party, and his life-long friendship with James Laughlin of New Directions
even contained in microcosm some of the conflicting attitudes he held toward East Coast
power, wealth and culture.

William Everson saw the opposition between the San Francisco renaissance/beat
movement in terms of conflicting Dionysian and Apollonian tendencies within the
culture. And many times Rexroth seems to imitate this distinction, especially in a poem
like "Vitamins and Roughage."

Strong ankled, sun burned, almost naked,
The daughters of California

Educate reluctant humanists;

Drive into their skulls with tennis balls
The unhappy realization

That nature is still stronger than man.
The special Hellenic privilege

Of the special intellect seeps out

At last in this irrigated soil.

Sweat of athletes and juice of lovers
Are stronger than Socrates' hemlock;

And the games of scrupulous Euclid
Vanish in the gymnopaedia [25]

But Rexroth was not an easy fit into such a clear distinction. He, in many ways,

always admired the cultural apogees of learning and sophistication that the East

-127-

represented, yet as time went on he also felt that they were increasingly relics, and not
replenishing deposits, from the past. His organic view of reality, a view that was
increasingly supported by findings in science and by his observations of the western
landscape, led him to embrace place, or geogaphy, as the primary factor in whether an
alternative culture could thrive. If a culture was organic, it could not be separated from
its place and the whole spectrum of that place's meanings and potentials.

Thus, in the end it was a place and counter-culture standing on its own, not
defining itself against, and thus subordinating itself to, the East that would determine the
long-term relevance of the renaissance. And what gave the West its most distinctive and
enduring meaning was not its politics, its history, or its aesthetic preferences. Apart from
the "regional imperatives" that were somehow linked to sea, mountains, and vast
distances, the rest lost its alternative flavor. These were the elements of the West
Rexroth always returned to for his own personal sense of literary identity, as numerous
poems attest, including "Hiking on the Coast Range":

The skirl of the kingfisher was never

More clear than now, nor the scream of the jay,
As the deer shifts her covert at a footfall;
Nor the butterfly tulip ever brighter .

In the white spent wheat; nor the pain

Of a wasp stab ever an omen more sure;
The blood alternately dark and brilliant

On the blue and white bandana pattern.

This is the source of evaluation,

This minimal prince rupert's drop of blood;
The patellae suspended within it,
Leucocytes swimming freely between them,
The strands of fibrin, the mysterious
Chemistry of the serum; is alone

The measure of time, the measure of space,
The measure of achievement.

-128-

There is no
Other source than this. [26]

-129-

CHAPTER 4 NOTES

1. Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1973), 3.
2. William Everson, Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region
(Berkeley: Oyez Press, 1976), 7-19.
3. John Tritica, "Regarding Rexroth: Interviews with Thomas Parkinson and William
Everson," (American Poetry 7:1, Fall 1989), 80-81.
4. Linda Hamalian, A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (New York, London: W.W.
Norton and Company, 1991), 44-45.
5. David Meltzer, Golden Gate: Interviews with 5 San Francisco Poets
(Berkeley: Wingbow Press, 1976), 20.
6. Ibid, 44.
7. Kenneth Rexroth, The Collected Shorter Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New
Directions, 1966), 169.
8. Everson, Archetype West, 103-104.
9. Everson, 104.
10. Rexroth, The Collected Shorter Poems..., 83-84.
11. Ibid, 234-236.
12. Meltzer, 91.
13. Kevin Starr, 47.
14. Richard Kostelanetz, The End of Intell igent Writing: Literary Politics in America
(New York: Sheed and Ward, 1974), 6.
15. Everson, 107.
16. Rexroth, L.A. Vanguard (No. 16, July 16-23, 1975), 16.
17. Stanley Bumshaw, in New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties, ed. by Joseph
North (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 58.
18. Rexroth, "Revolt: True and False," World Outside the Window: The Selected
Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New Directions, 1987), 75.
19. Rexroth, “The Art of Literature,” in World Outside the Window, 298.
20. Jerome Rothenberg, ed. Revolution of the Word: A Gathering of American Avant-
Garde Poetry 1914-1945 (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), xi.
21. David Antin, "Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in
American Poetry," The Avant-Garde Tradition in Literature (Buffalo: Prometheus
Books, 1982), 219.
22. Rexroth, Autobiographical Novel (Santa Barbara: Ross-Erikson, Inc., Publishers,
1982), 257.
23. Rexroth, The Collected Shorter Poems..., 37.
24. Ibid, 40.
25. Ibid, 150.
26. Ibid, 84.

-l30-

CHAPTER 5: THE HALF -WAY REVOLUTION: REXROTH, THE BEATS AND
BEYOND

"The essence of revolt is comprehension, the essence of disconformity is

understanding, and their second essence is purposeful action. " (Kenneth
Rexroth, "Revolt: True and False ")

In the introduction I referred to fact that Rexroth cannot be understood clearly imless
one recogrizes that he saw himself as a type of “spiritual aristocrat” This sense of himself
is revealed in many aspects of Rexroth's biogaphy. It is one explanation for the apparent
splits in his personality, namely that he could be both a snob and a proletarian, both a
teacher and a prophet; he presented himself as an avant-garde artist and scholar who wished
to speak to the masses, and in aesthetic terms he was both a Dionysian and an Apollonian It
was the cause of both his deep influence and ambiguous status within the communities be
effected In a slightly different context, William Everson explained Rexroth's archetypal
role as San F ancisco's "father" poet in these terms.

"The split in him between Objectivist precisionisrn and dionysian orgiastic-

celebration is awesome. This is why he was able to weld together the

precisionist-derived Pound-Williarns-Olson side of the attack on the

forrnalists (the attack on stasis), and the Whitrnanesque-Lawrentian-Reichian
side of the same confrontation" [1]

The attempt (ultimately unsuccessful) to contain within his own project all of the
rising energies from disparate camps of literary activity caused Rexroth, ironically, to be a
poet without a home. His attempts to create communities many times only heightened the

aura of discrete individuality around him, distancing him from those he sought to nourish

-13l-

Though he believed such communities had existed throughout history, Rexroth
found no real communities within his lifetime that could sustain and balance the necessary
elements of his organic idea]. In the Communist Party of the 19305, ideology got in the way
of human relationships. In the Beat movement of the late 19505, an unbridled romanticism
made it an individualistic phenomenon, not the herald of a new social consciousness. The
first was, in its own way, too aristocratic. The second was too spiritual. Neither embodied

what Rexroth himself symbolized, the integration of the two.

As I have stated several times throughout this study, the 1955 reading at 6 Gallery
represented for Kenneth Rexroth the potential point of cultural turning, the extra touch
applied to the fulcrum of spiritual history, for which he had working all his life. The most
durable cultural result of the 6 Gallery reading and all that led up to it was the public,
national emergence of the Beat movement in American culture, a phenomenon that roughly
spanned the years 1955-1965.

In tracing Rexroth's reactions to the developments and permutations of the beat
mevement in the late 19505 and early 19605, it is evident that he very quickly came to see it
as a counterfeit for the true spiritual revolution he hoped would emerge ficm the sense of
apocalypse in the younger generation following World War II. It fell short for him because
it generally lacked sufficient historical self-consciousness to realize a full disaffiliation from

the dominant society, and because it failed to embrace the sustaining values of communal

experience.

-l32-

For the purposes of this chapter, when I use the term "beat movement" or "beat
generation" I am referring to the development of a certain identifiable aesthetic and lifestyle
during those years that can be traced, primarily, to the influences of Jack Kerouac, Allen
Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. The aesthetic is marked by a radically subjective view of
the literary/artistic process, in which texts are considered to be the unrnediated flow of the
writer’s consciousness, culminating in forms that have some direct relationship to the
writer's idiosyncratic personality, or even physiology. The lifestyle is undergirt by an
openness to sexual experimentation, the cultivation of a gromic persona, and the adoption of
what are perceived to be Asian attitudes towards the material world Writers like Gregory
Corso or Gary Snyder fulfill certain roles that the movement cultivated, but are not proto-
beats since, in the case of Corso, his talent and imagination were subordinate to the writers
mentioned above, or, in the case of Snyder, his ultimate sigrificance cannot be contained
within the cultural symbols that the beat movement fostered. These aspects of the
movement left it open to a vacuous ideology of individualism, and inevitably to cultural
nihilism

When various youth movements of the sixties drew back from the direction that had
been set by the initial beatniks and hipsters and promoted communal consciousness and
living patterns, Rexroth was quick to praise them. Yet he continued to distance himself
fi'om what he called the "upper hippoisie," those who "confused transcendence with
sensationalism," [2] and who eventually revealed themselves as bourgeois egoists in their

primary concern for self-perpetuation

"Therealfar-outhippieisthepersonwhois actually engagedinapersonal
revolt against the very evil family, a corrupt society and so forth It is not a

-l33-

massive social phenomenon, except it is a social phenomenon reflecting the

collapse of this society...There's not the slightest bit of difference between

Rasputin's circle and upper-middle-class hippie life. " [3]

In Chapter One I alluded to how Rexroth was moved to tears by Allen Ginsberg's
reading of "Howl" at the Six Gallery in 1955, and how it represented to him the breaking
upon history of the voice of a new, seceding culture in America, a culture of alternative
values that he hoped would spawn a wider spiritual revolution.

Yet he also saw this new poetic energy as the entry of American poetry into the
discourse of the international avant-garde. In a sense, he recoglized it as the sigr of
America's literary coming of age, the fulfillment of the prophecy voiced by Walt Whitman
one hundred years earlier. But where Whitman could be interpreted as advocating a sort of
American spiritual supremacy, Rexroth hoped to subvert this idea by viewing the new
poetry and subculture of dissent as America's opportunity to attain to ideals that were not
merely national in character, but that had to do with a spiritual consciousness handed down
cross-culturally and without respect to the abstract notions of modern international relations.

So, in its initial energy, the beat movement that burst into fruition at the 6 Gallery
represented for Rexroth the spirit of human revolt against all the dehumanizing and
inorganic tendencies in the dominant, provincial culture. It was the howl that revealed an
undercurrent of desperate dissent within an entire generation Yet he soon recognized that
its energy was not directed towards anything that could sustain alternative cultural ideals.
The beat writings became the sign of spiritual revolution, but for Rexroth they contained

hardly any traces of a spiritual constitution.

-134-

They did not point the path towards either true personhood or true community,
which for him were the primary components of the alternative society. His view was that
truly revolutionary activity always serves interrelated human ends, since it is in fact
humanity fully reasserting itself against dehumanizing forces. And for Rexroth, the intellect
has a large role to play in mediating the experiences of the poet who is forming and
reinforcing alternative values. The beats lacked either the will or the ability to perform this
intellective fimction

To reiterate, Rexroth saw the beat movement in its initial energy as one possible
form in which the intitial disengagement of the alternative society might take place. It
embodied a restless, destabilizing energy that pressed against the icy cake of custom. But as
he was to recoglize, it did not contain the truly alternate values of a new society, or even
promote them, except in very select cases. Though it initially seemed to signal a
resocialization of poetry, and the restoration of a communal folklore element to literature,
the dominant urge in the most representative writers was towards expressions of narrow
subjectivity, works that advanced neither an awareness of social possibilities, nor a true
disaffiliation from the dominant cultural forms.

Rexrcth recogrized this even in his 1957 essay, "Disengagement: The Art of the
Beat Generation," which was largely celebratory of the Beats, among whom he included the
whole goup of indigenous younger West Coast poets. At the end of the essay, though, he
prophetically appended a warning in regard to the direction the beat movement was already
beginning to follow, stating,

"The disengagement of the creator, who, as creator, is necessarily judge, is
one thing, but the utter nihilism of the emptied-out hipster is another. What

-l35-

is going to come of an attitude like this? It is impossible to go on

indefinitely saying: ‘I am proud to be a delinquent,’ without destroying all

civilized values. Between such persons no true enduring interpersonal
relationships can be built, and of course, nothing resembling a true ‘culture' -

-an at-homeness of men with each other, their work, their loves, their

environment The end result must be the desperation of shipwreck - the

despair, the orgies, ultimately the cannibalism of a lost lifeboat. I believe

that most of an entire generation will go to ruin - the ruin of Celine, Artaud,

Rimbaud, voluntarily, even enthusiastically." [4]

It must have pained Rexroth to write such words, since it was a recognition that the
present generation was falling into the opposite trap of the one his 1930's generation had
stumbled into. Whereas the pre-war generation had abandoned the virtues of individual
inviolability and true human culture for the dictates of collectivism, the post-war generation,
while containing so much more revolutionary promise, seemed destined to stress the value
and frontiers of individual experience to such an extreme that it would destroy the values of

human community fi'om the other direction.

From Rexroth's point of view, both generations fell victim to a very American, or
more specifically Calvinist, duality and historical dialectic that he recoglized and hoped to
transcend through a poetry renaissance.

According to Rexroth, writing that implied energy, but not enduring human values,
was just as incomplete as writing that was progarnmatic and susceptible to Party review.
While the latter type of writing deadened the individual sensibility, which is the initial
source of all social change, the former type of writing courted a nihilistic solipsism that was
the antithesis of the type of mysticism that "kept the light of civilization alive," the type of

mysticism that revealed the deep organic relations of which reality was constituted

-136-

In American Poetry in the Twentieth Century, Rexroth said that one of the reasons
he was so attracted to San Francisco was that it, unlike every other major American city,
seemed untainted by a New England Calvinist consciousness. There was a lack of sexual
uptightness and religously-justified capitalism, but there was also less of a stigna attached
to the resulting underclass of "under-achievers," especially those who sought spiritual
fulfillment outside the parameters of capitalist success.

Perry Miller has described the Puritan consciousness as a continuing dialectic in the
evolution of American culture between the two sides of an essential Calvinist nature. In his
essay, "From Edwards to Emerson," he writes,

"...there was in Puritanism a piety, a religious passion, the sense of an inward

communication and of the divine symbolism of nature. One side of the

Puritan nature hungered for these excitements; certain of its appetites desired

these satisfactions and therefore found delight and ecstacy in the doctrines of

regeneration and providence. But in Puritanism there was also another side,

an ideal of social conformity, of law and order, of regulation and control. At

the core of the theology there was an indestructible element which was

mystical, and a feeling for the universe which was almost pantheistic; but

therewasalsoasocialcodedemandingobediencetoextemallaw,acodeto

which good people vollmtarily conformed and to which bad people should

be made to conform. It aimed at propriety and decency, the virtues of

middle-class respectability, self-control, thrift, and diglity, at a discipline of

the emotions." [5]

Miller explains that the development of American culture throughout the 18th and
19th centuries was marked by a historical dialectic of dominance between these Puritan
characteristics in the culture. For example, in a general sense, New Light
Congegationalism spawned Unitarianisrn, which spawned Transcendentalism. And with
the Transcendentalists, this essentially religious dialectic within the culture entered and

helped to form one strand of the American literary tradition

~137-

From Rexroth's point of view, the beats' literature and influence preserved this
dialectic within American culture rather than transcending it in a new vision of the human
personality in community. They preserved it by embodying its pantheistic side, which alone
can do no more than stand as a reverse-mirror image of the culture of conformity. They
defined themselves in terms that made no sense apart from the presence of what they were
in conflict with There's was primarily a negative revolt, its virtues defined by their
oppositional character.

The beats' involvement in this dialectic, and Rexroth's possible transcendence of it,
is perhaps best shown in their respective attitudes towards sex Because I wanted to suess
Rexroth's broad social and cultural ideas, I have not examined his ideas about sex, although
readers of his poetry would probably consider that to be his central concern. Interestingly,
though, Rexroth never wrote an expository essay on the subject, and mention of sex is rare
in his prose works as a whole.

Certainly an openness towards, and glorification of, sexuality is implied in Rexroth's
organic ideal, even apart from the poetry. In this regard Rexroth is heir of earlier Romantic
writers. Yet in his poetry sex is almost always described as a sacramental act within the
context of marriage. It is the vehicle for a man and a woman to enter into a mystical
synthesis on a higher plane of knowledge. In some aspects his language is absolutely
biblical in its connotations. Yet in post-war Christian America is was also absolutely
subversive. The poetry's depiction of unashamed sensuality being blessed and sanctified by
the forces of nature into which the lovers merged pointed towards values that were

incomprehensible to a generation that was shocked by Elvis Presley's gyrating hips.

-l38-

The Beats, though, proved themselves to be just as far removed from the sexual
values expressed in Rexroth's poetry as the rest of America was. In breathlessly opposing
the sexual rules of the era, by being casual to the point of flippancy about sex, or by
recording every nuance of homosexual lovemaking in their journals, they made sex into a
thorougly political, rather than sacramental, act The beats never allowed sex to become an
emblem of enduring values and the sacredness of relationship. It did not even become a
subjective experience of the Other. As presaged in Allen Ginsberg's description of his
poetic calling, sex, and poetry for the beats were always some form of elaboration on
masturbation, the ultimate taboo in 19505 America.

For Rexroth, though, alternativity meant transcendence in every area of culture, not
mere opposition; according to his vision of the alternate, organic society it was possible to
preserve a type of natural social discipline and harmony while not trampling on the
meaningfulness and creativity of lives in their individuality. Yet this required a truly
alternative paradign. The Beats never really embraced such a paradign, embracing instead
the somewhat solitary "religious passion" of the heretical Puritan The initial, primary texts
of the Beats reveal this affinity, especially when read in the light of a sympathetic

contemporaneous interpretation of what the Beats represented

In a series of essays written in the late 1950's and early 1960's, John Clellon Holmes
described the beats and their acolytes as a generation obsessed with a religious quest, and
with the exploration of new fi'ontiers, experiences and states of consciousness. It was a

generation that was caught in a metaphysical crisis, knowing they lacked something, but not

-l39-

knowing exactly what it was. This provoked an endless curiosity as to what experiences
might be able to connect them to something real. The dominant conformity disallowed this
search and thus led the Beats to rely on what Holmes called an "instinctive individuality."
[6]

Arising out of their utter lack of personal and cultural moorings, the Beat generation
was driven not by a nostalgiac sense of a faith discarded, but rather by an intense
preoccupation with the need for a new and authentic faith.

"It is a will to believe, even in the face of an inability to do so in

conventional terms. And that is bound to lead to excesses in one direction or
another." [7]

Holmes went on to assert that both the Beat and the Young Republican lalew that
"the valueless abyss of modern life is unbearable," and they both had "had enough
homelessness, valuelessness, faithlessness," [8]; they simply responded to it in different
ways, only one of which was comprehensible within the conventions of society. Holmes
observed that

"...parents, civic leaders, law-enforcement officers, and even literary

critics...see no signs of a search for spiritual values in a generation whose

diverse tragic heroes have included jazzman Charlie Parker, actor Dean, and

poet Dylan Thomas; and whose interests have ranged all the way from bebop

to rock and roll; ficm hipsterisrn to Zen Buddhism; from vision-inducing

drugs to Method acting. To be told that this is a generation whose almost

exclusive concern is the discovery of something in which to believe seems to

them to fly directly in the face of all the evidence...," [9]

which begs the question of whether a never-ending search is qualitatively different
then a never-ending flight But Holmes does admit that "it is a generation with a geater
facility for entertaining ideas than for believing in them." Still, in a positive sense, he

discerned that the beat movement was flmdamerltally a declaration of the value of the

- 140-

human, and an outcry against de-hurnanization in an apparently valueless age. Their icons
bore this out -

"It was exactly as if Brando were saying in scene after scene; ‘Man is not

merely a social animal, a victim, a product. At the bottom, man is a

spirit...'," [10]

spirit evidently being defined as that which imparts essential value and worthiness to
receive love. The solitary cry of the hidden, autonomous, and undetermined spirit is thus the
prototypical mode of beat expression, which explains their romantic fascination with jazz,
since, as Holmes claims,

"...jazz is primarily the music of inner fieedom, of improvisation, of the

creative individual rather than the interpretive goup. It is the music of a

submerged people, who feel free, and this is precisely how young people feel

today." [11]

It also explains their poetics of spontaneity.

"All of them believe that only that which cries to be said, no matter how

‘unpoetic' it may seem; only that which is unalterably true to the sayer, and

burstsoutofhiminaflood, findingitsownformasitcomes, isworththe

saying in the first place." [12]

And finally, Holmes explained that the basic intellectual stance of the beats was one
defined by opposition to all historical modes of thought that tried to organize the world
outside the self - an upsetting stance to critics as diverse as Paul Goodman and Norman
Podhoretz In Goodman's case, Holmes writes that the beats' "spiritual preoccupation-made
him impatient," since as a good materialist

"He doesn‘t really believe there is a ‘metaphysical crisis;' it is only that work

has been made meaningless, interpersonal relations are beset by moralistic

shibboleths, and most of our values are unrelated to reality. But all this, he
says, can befixed." [13]

-l4l-

On the other hand, Podhoretz the traditionalist was angered by attitudes that he
perceived to be "apolitical, asocial, and amoral," and by the beats' primary preoccupation
with "intuitions, soul states, and affirmations of Being." [14] Holmes admits that "given
[Podhoretz's] values, his charges are all tmderstandable," but he says that, in the end, the
budding neo-conservative criticized the Beats for not looking at things coherently,
rationally, and responsibly, which was their point - that old modes of thought had failed.
[15] There are points of ageement between Goodman, Podhoretz, and Rexroth, primarily
because they were all self-conscious intellectuals confi'onted with a seeming anti-
intellectualisrn, yet Rexroth, as will be seen, was the only one who didn't charge the Beats
with any essential error of viewpoint, except that they were unable to extend their spiritual
protest into the broader terms of human culture.

Hohnes, the most prominent early chronicler of the beats, was ultimately ambiguous
about the lasting contributions of the generation He said that it was primarily a literary, not
a social movement, but that it nevertheless influenced the culture of politics, shaped the
subsequent social movements of the 1960's, and made the avant-garde chic, in a not

altogether commodified way [16].

Not all of the beats necessarily accepted Hohnes's formulations wholeheartedly, but
their most famous early writings largely confirmed them

Jack Kerouac's On the Road is probably the ultimate aesthetic expression of the
emerging Beat Generation, and illustrates much of John Clellon Hohnes' commentary. It
was first published in 1957 by The Viking Press, under the sponsorship of literary critic

- I42-

Malcolm Cowley, at exactly the right time to catch the surging wave of attention that the
beats were starting to receive.

The story itself is a semi-fictional account of the cross-country travels and
adventures of a Don Quixote-type character, Dean Moriarity, and his narrating Sancho
Panza, Sal Paradise. It is also not so 1005er based on the actual experiences of Neal
Cassady (Dean), and Kerouac himself (Sal).

The prose style is meant to exemplify the first-thought-best-thought aesthetics of
spontaneity, in which the writing finds its own unmediated form as it gushes fi'om the
writer's consciousness. Kerouac did nothing to squelch, and indeed promoted, the myth that
On the Road was composed entirely in a single, unstinting marathon session at the
typewriter, when in fact, at most, only the final draft was produced in this way. An initial
draft had been composed as early as 1948.

The implicit anti-intellectualism in this romantic stance, and the cultivation of an
irrational prose style, is figured in the character of Dean Moriarity himself. Dean, who is
also meant to personify pure sexual energy, seems, at the beginning of the novel, to be
possessing the nrdiments of a new poetics - the interspersing of cliched phrases or sayings
within a constant refrain of monosyllables, representing a type of Dionysian overwhelming
of the Apollonian Yet by the end, when the phrases drop out and only the monosyllabics
remain, an elegaic tone has taken over the prose, giving one the idea that perhaps Kerouac
(Sal) isuneasyabouttheroadDeanistaldnghimdown.

Nevertheless, the overall prose style remains fairly consistent to the end; at times

eloquent, at times manic, but always pushing against the appearance of control and linguistic

-143-

discipline. It is meant to flow, flow, flow, creating the precise emblem of the writer's

immediate access to the constant flow of his own mental impressions.
"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down
river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all tlmt
raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast,
and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in
Iowa 1 know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let
the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God
is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler
dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that
blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore
in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides
the forlorn rags of gowing old, I think of Dean Moriarity, I even think of
Old Dean Moriarity the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarity. "

[17]
The only question left at the end of the novel pertains to whether Sal is any closer to

Paradise than he was at the beginning, whether hope has been negated and consumed by the
very energy that he thought was his salvation Having placed all his bets on energy, or
"going," and having considered ideas (like Dean) to be completely transient, Lockean
flashes resulting frcm a myriad of sense impressions, he is left with only nostalgia as an
impetus to any further action. The construction of anything socially meaningfirl, which for
Rexroth required some familiarity with the international discourse regarding social ideas, is
undermined by the extremely Modernist impulse to immediately destroy, or move beyond,
what has been created.

Even though On the Roads plot revolves partly around Sal Paradise's attempts to
find and maintain fiiendships, this thematic aspect of the novel is repeatedly undercut by the
pantheistical, or more accurately, monist character of the mystical experience Sal is questing

after. At times he approaches this state while listening to jazz in a club, but the supreme

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mystical moment in his adventure occurs in a jungle in Mexico, when, lying on top of their
rapidly deteriorating jalopy, he realizes
"[f]or the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched
me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me. The atmosphere
and I became the same. Soft infinitesimal showers of microscopic bugs
* fanned down on my face as I slept, and they were exuemely pleasant and
soothing. The sky was starless, utterly unseen and heavy. I could lie there

all night long with my face exposed to the heavens, and it would do me no
more harm than a velvet drape drawn over me. " (italics mine) [18]

This is actually a very traditional mysticism - the merging of all into the One - but
Kerouac juxtaposes this scene with the drug-affected failures of communication and
responsibility that also occur during their Mexican sojourn. Kerouac describes an
experience that many mystics have sought, but it is framed as a reality that, is entirely
unrelated to the world of relationships and mimdane (dailiness). In fact, it is a denial of the
reality of that world. Thus, in terms that Arthur Schlesinger used regarding .the
Transcendentalists, it was a desertion of democracy (or the concern about social relations)
for pure philosophy (or mysticism).

Or, as Rexroth said in a review of the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, it had nothing to
do with the rhythms of daily living. Its subjectivism was related to the non-conformism of
Anne Hutchinson and Henry Thoreau, who, while bearing witness to the essential
inviolability of the individuaL were unable to integate that individual inviolability into an

organic and enduring human community.

Where Kerouac's On the Road epitomized John Clellon Holmes' characterization of

the Beats as spiritual questers who act out of a sense of "instinctive individuality," Allen

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Ginsberg's Howl was the ultimate expression of what Rexroth would call "the emotional
apprehension of alienation," which is close to what Holmes meant when he talked about
"beat-ness" itself.

In a social sense, Ginsberg's poem is descriptive, rather than prescriptive or
proscriptive. As Rexroth recognized, it crystallized in aesthetic form the spiritual condition
of western culture at that particular moment in history. Not that Ginsberg's description did
not have precedents in Baudelaire, Artaud, and even Villon, but what was sigrificant for
Rexroth was that Ginsberg seemed to speak for an entire generational consciousness, and
that he presented this consciousness vocally, communicated within a communal
environment, potentially setting into play an entirely unprecedented set of cultural
dynamics. It did not quite work out the way Rexroth hoped, but the energy was there in
lines that were surreally descriptive of that generation's "metaphysical crisis," as Holmes
described it

The opening lines about "the best minds of my generation" are well known, along
with the nearly invariable use of "who" to begin in each breath-phrase.

"who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but / the shadow of
dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in / fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts / with big
pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre- / hensible leaflets

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze / of
Capitalism,

who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and / undressing
while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and / wailed down Wall, and the Staten
Island feny also wailed,

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who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before / the machinery
of other skeletons,..." [19]

In a letter to the poet Richard Eberhart, which Eberhart later published, Ginsberg
described Howl as an "affirmation." I would argue from this representative fiagnent that it
is an affirmation of only a limited, though not unimportant type. What is more obvious is
the building of a grand trope around the theme of despair and nihilistic protest/revolt The
profound effect of the poem, for those who were at the 6 Gallery, and for many of those who
read it subsequently, was that it acted as an affirmation of identity and existence, rather than
of relevant values. It was an affirmation of the "human," as Hohnes asserted was true of the
entire Beat Generation It was also a historical moment of definition and self-recogrition

For Rexroth that moment of self-recoglition was a necessary feat of consciousness,
similar or analogous to the entry into self-consciousness of the proletariat that Marx
prophesied as a part of his historical dialectic, yet Rexroth hoped that the new post-war
consciousness would not be followed by the assertion of a counter-ideology. He hoped that
it would be a moment of cultural clarification, a sort of prologue to a manifesto, without the
manifesto. Rexroth never wanted to write a manifesto of the alternative culture, not even in
his own poetry, because it would have been artificial.

At the 6 Gallery he was simply "blown away" by the sudden display of physical and
literary evidence that the incipient alternative culture was aware of its own existence. It was
up to them to build upon this self-consciousness, but Rexroth felt that he could be an

intellectual guide and resource throughout the integative process.

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The second, "Moloch" section of Ginsberg's poem is an even more explicit statement
of protest and revolt, characterizing the dominant, military-industrial, and commercial
society in demonic terms and bearing witness to the degree of his own possession by this
demon
"Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running / money! Moloch
whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast / is a cannibal dynamo!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness / without a
body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ec- / stasy! [20]

The religious diction and passion here is subtly reminiscent of camp-meeting
rhetoric during the First and Second Great Awakenings, yet as with the case of the Puritan
heretics, there is an implicit denial of original sin ("who frightened me out of my natural
ecstasy! "), without the denial of the existence of real evil, which is usually cloaked in the
representative forms of the dominant hierarchy. This sort of social indictment could have
possrhly been explicitly extended into a formulation of interrelated social ideals, yet of
course tluit was not Ginsberg's primary purpose or impetus throughout the poem

The third, "Carl Solomon" section of the poem, which was written later, is on the
surface a declaration of social identity between Ginsberg and Solomon, but which is more
clearly a romanticization of the institutionalized Solomon on the order of Lionel Trilling's
description of John Keats as a hero of the individual consciousness. Thus, by inferral
through the diachronically repeated phrase of identification, it is also Ginsberg's self-
romanticization as a "Hebrew socialist" revolutionist of the spirit.

"I'm with you in Rockland

where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and

-l48-

immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again / from its
pilgimage to a cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland

where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew

socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland

where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your / living human
Jesus from the superhuman tomb [21]

For Rexroth, Howl was an important marker of the potential disaffiliation fiom
society of that society's future. Its potential communal sigrificance was shown by the
crowd's reaction and the various witnesses to its effect on their consciousnesses.

"What happened in San Francisco first and spread from there across the

world was public poetry, the return of a tribal, preliterate relationship
between poet and audience." [22]

Yet the poem affinned the value of the human primarily through its "howl" against
"the valueless abyss of modern life, and not through the reflection or implicit mediation of
constructive alternative values. It was a how! that found resonance among many younger
writers and artists, and was not a vvrong-headed affirmation; it was simply a necessarily
limited one.

While the beats became a national sensation, they were easily assimilated into the
culture they opposed because adhered to one side of the historical dialectic that defined its
development They simply did not know enough to become a true cultural avant-garde, in
Rexroth's eyes. They were not adequately informed about the historical foundations of
culture and the possibilities regarding a transcendence of their present culture's entire value

system.

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Rexroth's project, from the Classics Revisited reviews he gave over the radio to the
Friday evening "discussions" in his home, had been meant to equip a cultural avant—garde
that would be able to do this. Rather than seeing Rexroth as a jealous old man who resented
the invasion of his turf by the young bohemians, which is the view of most critics, I would
like to advance the notion that he was more than willing to accept the beats, if only they had
proved themselves worthy to accomplish something lasting in the culture.

As the months and years went by after the Six Gallery reading, Rexrcth felt more
and more constrained to point out the limitations not only of the beats, but of modern
American poetry as a whole. Thus, in 1963 he wrote his most penetrating, and, in some
cases, outrageous assessment. Published in Arts in Society, his essay "Why is American
Poetry Culturally Deprived," made the broad assertion that American poets, since the
beginning of the century and up through the Beats, had shown a severe lack of intellectual
awareness and rigor. Even those who professed to write from a position of broad social
awareness, and had become famous for doing so, fell short of transcending a particular type
of American provincialism.

"I have known the leading exponents of all the movements in American

poetry which presumed ideological motivation, that at least attempted to

assume the language of those general ideas which were part of the storm and

stress of international thought Without exception (italics mine), these ideas

came to their poet exponents only through the most superficial literary

journalism, were never comprehended, either the simple elements or their
consequences, and were never in fact acted upon" [23]

Then he gets down to brass tacks. I quote liberally to show how Rexroth's

Menckenesque polemicism comes into full-blown power over things that have long

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disturbed him. And, as with Mencken, one must always read between the lines, conscious
of the writer's life-long project, to understand the real message.

Of Carl Sandburg, a poet for whom he had often expressed admiration, Rexroth
wrote,

"His attitude towards ‘the people' was a compound of Chicago police-court
reporter sentimentality, Midwest smalltown Populist oratory, and Hull
House maidenly magnanimity. The picture of the young Sandburg
breathlessly following the debates in the international socialist movement
over Bernstein's Revisionism, the Millerand crisis, Luxemburg and Kautsky
disputing the questions of imperialism and the falling rate of profit is so
ridiculous it is not even laughable." [24]

Of American Modernism, he called it "a movement of technical reform of syntax
and a cleaning up of the vocabulary of poetry." As for its intellectual importance:

"The profound revolutions of the sensibility, the climactic changes in the
soul of modern man, so-called, which began with Baudelaire, Kierkegaard,
Newman, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche and which represent in fact a
systematic destructive criticism of the foundations of humanism and
hurnanitarianisrn, and which have thrown up in the course of their ever-
accelerating liquidation all the anti-humane art movements and philosophies
of our time, were, to judge from the evidence, totally incomprehensible to
the American imitators of their stylistic innovations - even at the remove of
fifty WM" [25]

Humanitarianism in this essay Rexroth is not. Carrying out more fully his assault on
the intellects of the American modemists, he wrote that Eliot and Pound turned fascist

"...sirnply because fascism is so much more easily assimilated by simple and
emotionally unstable minds - you don't have to read so many books." [26]

Yet Rexroth is not entirely vicious. He has some mixed praise for poets such as Paul
Goodman, Conrad Aiken, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and Allen Ginsberg with his

"emotional consciousness of the fact of apocalypse." He doesn't praise their poetry

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necessarily for the intellectual content they implied, except in Stevens to a certain extent, but
rather because
"It serves society as [poetry] always has, as a symbolic criticism of value, but

the values it concerns itself with are not those of philosophy or a
metaphysics of the conscience." [27]

And he finishes with an assessment of someone he truly considered to be a fiiend.
"So with William Carlos Williams, who for contemporary taste is the best of
the generation of Classic Modemists. As a handler of general ideas,
Williams is pathetic. As either aesthetic or epistemology, his favorite phrase,
‘No ideas but in things,‘ is infantile. He thought of his great poem Paterson
as a philosophic epic preaching precisely that profound philosophy. What it
is, of course, is a profound organization of the life experience of a mall-
town doctor with all of a small-town doctor's infinite roots into a community

into which he was bonl, practiced medicine, and never left except for
vacations. " [28]

This essay siglaled an admission of defeat by Rexroth of his long-standing vision of
bringing about a cultural renaissance in America through the enlivening and sustaining
effect of poetry. He does not abandon the essentials of the vision, but he does become more
open to other avenues of counter-cultural integation, and personally, he begins to withdraw
from the activities that had characterized his earlier life. After 1963, as expressed through
his poetry and style of life, he began to retreat into a spiritual isolation that was partly a
repudiation of his organic vision, but also a late reinstatement of his early sense of belonging

to an elite spiritual aristocracy.

Earlier I mentioned that Rexroth tried to help enact a poetry renaissance that would
have the social effect of transcending the Calvinist cultural dialectic, a dialectic consisting of

a pantheistic religious enthusiasm and, its other side, an ideal of social conformity. This

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transcendence, he believed, would be rooted in poetry's ability to mediate values that were
neither individualistic (in both a hedonistic and existentialist sense) nor collective, but that
gew out of the organic interchange between the individual and society. The geat British
anarchist and aesthetician Herbert Read, a geat influence on Rexroth, described this
interchange as the only basis for an enduring art, asserting that
"the work of art, by processes which we have so far failed to understand, is a
product of the relationship which exists between an individual and a society,
and no great art is possible unless you have as corresponding and
contemporary activities the spontaneous frwdom of the individual and the

passive coherence of a society. To escape from society (if that were
possible) is to escape from the only soil fertile enough to nourish art." [29]

When Jack Kerouac wrote a letter to Rexroth in 1958 as an attempt at conciliation,
but that also cautioned the older writer to "IGNORE WAR," he was advocating an
impossibility, for to ignore the atmosphere of war that shrouded the post-war world was to
banish fiom consciousness a large part of what that society meant [30] It was expressing the
view that writing was the embellishment of a narrowed subjectivity, and the courting of a
supposedly "higher" consciousness, rather than the full and mature subjectivity that Leo
Hamalian has stated was Rexroth's distinctive attainment. Kerouac's was an attitude and
attendant literary output that valued vision to the exclusion of reality, while paradoxically
resulting in impotent submission to an other-directed reality. The fact that Kerouac became
a very popular writer meant something significant, and sinister, to Rexroth as he entered the
twilight of his life. Hamalian observes that Rexroth's poetry, contrarily, gew "out of the
tensions and sirniliarities between the world of his visions and the world of reality." [31]

This sort of poetics is best expressed in some of Rexroth's long poems, which have

garnered little critical discussion In "The Dragon and the Unicorn," which critic Thomas

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Parkinson has called a twentieth century masterpiece, Rexroth presents a poem that
fluctuates between the narration of experience and philosophical commentary, gadually
effecting, in the sympathetic reader, a merging of these two realms; life and thought, act and
idea - a merging he had once hoped to effect throughout the entire culture in the final
dispelling of alienation as the culture's dominant characteristic.

The heart's mirror hangs in the void.
Vision blossoms in the night
Like stars opening in the brain.
Jehovah created the world

In six days. The Bible does not
Mention the nights. He holds the
Creation of the night in
Concealment for His own ends.
There is no reality

Except that of experience

And experience is the
Conversation of persons.

The next day, up the river

Through the hills, through Llangadfyn
And the high moors of the Border.

I stop in a fisherrnan's inn

Just this side of Welshpool. Cold mutton
And black beer for supper. The guests
Are English, decent people, but

Too much like drawings in Punch.
Igointothepub,fullof

Peasants singing and drinking beer.
No one speaks English except

To me, but they are all very

Friendly and buy me drinks and

Ask wistfully if I think

America plans to go to war.

Not having been in the habit

Of using "we" when I mean the

State Department, it takes time

To explain that America

15 several different persons,

Some of them like Welsh peasants.

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They are curious about John

L. Lewis, who is to Wales what
Giannini is to Italy.

The room reeks very pleasantly

Of the Welsh smell. I shall never
Know what it is, you can't ask,

"I say, what makes you smell so odd?"
Later when I tried to get some
Information on the subject

From Dylan Thomas, he was quite
Put out But my hiking guides,
Shropshire and the Border, North Wales,
Still smell in California

In the morning, loud with birds,
Wales drops behind me. Never

Will I find better people

Or a more beautifill country.

All things, all entities of
Whatsoever nature are

Only perspectives on persons.
Each moment of the universe

15 a moment of choice, chosen
Out of the infinite system

Of possibility which forms

The content of experience,

The continuously shifting

And flowing organism

Of relationships, its form
Determined by the character

Of the willing agent, its

Contents the evaluative

Strands and strains, the perspectives
Connecting with all other persons.
Each moment of the imiverse
And all the universes

Are reflected in each other

And in all their parts and

Thence again in themselves. [32]

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THE SIXTIES AS AFTERMATH

In the 1960's the beat movement transmogified into the hippie craze, and San
Francisco became the scene of intense ideological debate (under cover of aesthetics)
concerning the future of poetry. One direction the avant-garde took was toward the
formulation of a poetics based largely on Ludwig Wittgenstein's insights into the nature of
language - the so-called "L=A=N=G= = =G=E" poets. Other poets became much more
ideological in their work, especially with the onset of the Vietnam War and the growth of a
new protest movement to speak out against US. involvement. At the same time, Berkeley
became the the cultural and media focal point of the Bay area, as students resisted
Administration discipline to an unprecedented degee.

The 19605 also saw the departure of Kenneth Rexroth from San Francisco for good.
In 1966 he travelled with Carol Tinker and his daughter Mary to Germany and Scandinavia,
and in 1967 he visited Brussels, Paris, Barcelona, Singapore, Thailand, China and Japan. In
1968 he accepted a position on the English faculty at the University of California-Santa
Barbara and nestled into a small home in Montecito, where he pretty much kept to himself,
not mingling with a faculty who, as he said, "think Montessori is something with cheese and
tomato sauce." [33] Yet he was hardly sentimental towards San Francisco at that time
either, calling it a "typical mafia rim town, like Chicago when I left in 1927." [34]

How much of this is to be chalked up to pure crankiness is difficult to tell. He was
entering his sixties himself, and still felt himself to be useful. But almost everyone was
viewing him as a museum piece from an earlier time. Perhaps this is why Rexroth

published his autobiographical novel in 1964 and ended its nan'ative in 1929 - it revealed

-lS6-

him as a precocious young radical who was involved in the same issues as those the 19605
presented. Yet if this was the strategy, it backfired, since most reviews talked about how
Rexroth was from a "simpler" era in American history. It seemed that it was impossible for
him to make the most obvious things about himself understood

In the same context he said that he had not made a true fiiend in San Francisco,
except for his second wife Marie, in the forty years he lived there. This is of course an
exaggeration, since the book that Geoffrey Gardner put together in 1980, entitled simply,
For Rexroth, showed that he always had more friends than he was perhaps aware of. [35]
But considering the disarray of the culture, and San Francisco in particular, in comparison to
the actual simplicity of his cultural vision, it is probably safe to say that a little bitterness
lurked beneath the surface of his writing.

While at Santa Barbara Rexroth was primarily employed by the university in
teaching a class of his own invention, "Poetry and Performance." In this class the only
requirement was that each student devise some sort of creative performance to be put on in
front of the class. As an example of Rexroth's laxity towards the students' "creativity," one
student of a minimalist sensibility merely shot an arrow across the stage.

Needless to say, a majority of students claimed on their class evaluations that the
course was their all-time favorite. Surprisingly, though, several also said that they had
learned more in "Poetry and Performance" than in any other class, and made reference to the
rambling soliloquies Rexroth gave during most class periods. At the least, Rexroth was a
tremendous potential resource while at the Santa Barbara campus, yet one that went largely

unused by the suspicious English Department faculty.

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On one hand, Rexroth's conduct as a professor at U.C.- Santa Barbara was brilliantly
subversive of the established university regimen. It was difficult for the department to phase
out the course, since it was the most popular one on campus at a time when the news from
Berkeley made administrators and faculty more sensitive, if not to the desires of students, at
least to the dynamics of student rebellion And parents were also probably pleased with the
A's that every student who put on a performance received

On the other hand, the experience at UC-Santa Barbara could serve as an emblem
for the gadual retreat of Rexroth from the fervor of his earlier, pre-Beat idealism. In the
1960's and 1970's he became more of a reclusive contemplative and an iconic,
misunderstood figure for the counter-culture. He swam in the ocean and tended to a simple
garden, while writing or translating short lyrics that were Asian in tone and diction.

In fact, though, the pace of societal change was probably outpacing the relevance of
his vision of a poetry renaissance. He did not let go of it, but gew even more willing to let
his views be communicated through the standard, somewhat tame form of books,
Encyclopedia Britannica entries, and university lectures.

As sort of an ironic coda to his entire career as a poet and intellectual, Rexroth's
biogapher, Linda Hamalian, describes an event that happened in the spring of 1973, after
Rexroth was denied tenure at UCSB.

"In May [sic], a poetry reading was held at Campbell Hall in honor of

Rexroth, and to protest the action taken by the university. Among the poets

who participated were Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gary

Snyder. Snyder talked about the first time he read Rexroth's poems, how

impressed he was by Rexroth's ability to evoke life in the Sierras. He also

spoke about how Rexroth's political awareness and understanding of Asian

culture had influenced his own work Ferlinghetti reminisced about the days
when he first met Rexroth, before there was such a thing as the ‘San

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Francisco Literary Renaissance.‘ Accompanied by flautists and a guitar
player, Rexroth read some original poems and translations from the Chinese,
for which he received a standing ovation. The three-hour reading, which
drew a huge crowd - people had to sit on stage and in the aisles - was
covered as an important event by the San Francisco Examiner (March 11,
1973)." [36]

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CHAPTER 5 NOTES

1. William Everson, Dionysius and the Beat: Four Letters on the ArcheOpe, (Sparrow 63,
Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1977)

2. Kenneth Rexroth, “The Spiritual Alchemy of Thomas Vaughan,” World Outside the
Window: The Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth, (New York: New Directions, 1987),
251.

3. quoted in David Meltzer, Golden Gate: Interviews with 5 San Francisco Poets

(Berkeley: Wingbow Press, 1976), 56.

4. Rexroth, "Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation," World Outside the

Window, 55-56.

5. Perry Miller, "From Edwards to Emerson," in American T ranscendentalism: An

Anthology of Criticism (University of Notre Dame Press, 1973 ), 70.

6. John Clellon Hohnes, "This is the Beat Generation," Passionate Opinions: The

Cultural Essays (Fayettevillc: The University of Arkansas Press, 1988), 59.

7. Ibid., 61.

8. Ibid., 62-63.

9. Holmes, "The Philosophy of the Beat Generation," Passionate Opinions, 67-68.

10. Ibid, 71.

11. Ibid, 74.

12. Ibid, 75.

13. Holmes, "The Game of the Name," Passionate Opinions, 86.

14. Ibid, 83. '

15. Ibid, 89.

16. Ibid, 91.

17. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 309-310.

18. Ibid, 294.

19. Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1980 (New York: Harper & Row,

1984), 127.

20. Ibid, 131.

21. Ibid, 133.

22. Rexroth, American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (New York: Herder and

Herder, 1971), 141.
23. Rexroth, "Why is American Poetry Culturally Deprived?", World Outside the
Window, 209.

24. Ibid, 210.

25. Ibid, 210.

26. Ibid, 211.

27. Ibid, 217.

28. Ibid, 217.

29. Herbert Read, Anarchy and Order: Essays in Politics (London: Faber and

Faber, 1954), 61.
30. Jack Kerouac, January 14, 1958 letter to Rexroth (UCLA Special Collections).

-160-

31. Leo Hamalian, "Scanning the Self: The Influence of Emerson on
Rexroth," South Dakota Review 27:2, (Summer 1989), 5.

32. Rexroth, The Collected Longer Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New Directions,
1968), 106-108.
33. Rexroth, "A Crystal Out of Time and Space: The Poet's Diary," Conjunctions 8,

79.
34. Ibid, 76.
35. Among the friends who contributed to the volume were George Woodcock, Helen
Adam, John Ciardi, Richard Eberhart, Lawrence F erlinghetti, William Everson, John
Haines, Sam Hamill, Denise Levertov, Richmond Lattimore, Josephine Miles, Czeslaw
Milosz, Gloria Oden, Carl Rakosi, Edouard Roditi, Muriel Rukeyser, Eliot Weinberger, and
Theodore Weiss.
36. Linda Hamalian, A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (New York, London: W. W. Norton,

1991), 338.

-l6l-

CONCLUSION

As the phenomenon of the San Francisco Renaissance became engulfed in the
turrnoils and movements of the 1960’s, the Bay area became an incubus and testing
ground for many of the styles of political or social radicalism now associated with that
era. Perhaps more than anywhere else, San Francisco had a continuously vital radical
tradition to consult and find reinforcement. And in providing a living link between the
days of the Longshoremen’s’ strike of 1933 and the free speech confrontations of 1968,
Kenneth Rexroth may have been one of the primary factors in keeping that radical legacy
alive.

With his emphasis on anarchical pacifism, Rexroth was predictive of the most
effective mode of protest in the sixties, that of passive non-resistance; and his persistence
within the libertarian crowd to keep alive the ideal of a non-hierarchical structure of
organization was predictive of similar concerns about “participatory democracy” among
the New Left. In many ways, Rexroth and the San Francisco radical community were
working through models of political activity and social protest that groups in the sixties,
from Students for a Democratic Society to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
later worked through themselves. And if there had been direct channels of influence, the
later radicals could have learned much from the former’s activities.

Nevertheless, the San Francisco Renaissance was primarily concerned with the
reinvigoration of culture through literary and artistic means. Indeed, some of the primary

figures were relatively uninvolved in political activity, narrowly construed Most of them

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were only desirous of working as free and independent artists, able to produce and
circulate their wares within a non-repressive, non-ideological environment. This caused
them to agitate for reforms that would make this possible; still, it would be a stretch to
call them all revolutionaries.

Kenneth Rexroth, on the other hand, was deeply revolutionary both in feeling and
in motive. He may have always been tinted (or tainted) by his intense involvement in
1930’s-style radicalism, but he also recognized the weaknesses of that type of overt
radicalism and was always alert to ideological ways of reasoning. Instead, he turned
towards the possibility of changing “sensibilities,” or the way people lived their lives as
effected by their world-views. In the 1950’s he came to believe that if this could be
accomplished, society’s forms would also be transformed. Hence, his promotion of the
communal poetry reading as act of cultural integration.

In the 1960’s, the purity and stringency of Rexroth’s revolutionary ideals were
also revealed. As he saw the radical minority becoming co-opted, deintellectualized, and
unconscious of alienation as the primary danger to the culture, he tried to redefine terms
in order to stem the tide. Three essays from the period illustrate his diagnosis of the
times that were a’changin. ’ Taken together, they constitute one of the most concise,
unrelenting and tragic indictments of American society I have ever read.

1963’s “The Institutionalization of Revolt, The Domestication of Dissent,” first
published in Arts in Society, picks up on and develops the theme of his 1958 essay,
“Revolt: True and False,” that theme being societal co-optation or assimilation of dissent.

In the five intervening years, though, Rexroth had become, from his point of view, much

-l63-

less incredulous towards “Society’s” ability to turn radicalism into a fad. He had also
become much more pessimistic about the possibility of retaining the life-pattems of a
viable alternative culture, since most radicals succumbed to society’s image of the
radical. In 1958 he had sounded the warning note,

“Be very careful you don’t become what Madison Avenue wants every artist to be
- a wild man.” [1]

and in 1963 he looks back,

“I doubt if anybody was prepared for what happened. No one was expecting a
new kind of meretriciousnes, the kitsch of pseudo-alienation, to become the
popular culture of the next decade. I thought I was. I gave talks and wrote
articles mentioning such a possibility. But I always spoke in terms of precedents
— comic tricksters like Dali, nihilists of the good thing like Hemingway country
house weekend revolutionaries and later disillusioned revolutionaries like Auden
and Spender, Kierkegaard at PR-Time cocktail parties, all the factitiousness of the
compromised. . . It is this nihilistic total rejection of modern society which is
relatively new — new at least in its intensity, pervasiveness and almost immediate
acceptance as a fad by the very people against whom it was directed. Dope,
Dadaism, and destruction are domesticated today and part of all well-appointed
middle-class decor. . . ” [2]

This is an amplification of the point made in 1958, that revolt in itself, if not
directed by an alternative, humane value-system, can be turned towards very reactionary
and dangerous ends. But in 1958 he was not yet aware of the utter thoroughness of the
co—optation process, how even the extremes of disaffiliation could not only be
transformed into a commodity, but could actually serve as a positive support to the very
system one was condemning by acting as a sort of counter-balance or pressure valve. As

Rexroth writes, .

“. . . the immoralism of the new alienees is the immoralism of any country
club...” [3]

-l64-

I have already touched on the substance of 1963’s “Why is American Poetry
Culturally Deprived?” in an previous chapter, but in the context of the essay described
above, it can also be seen as part of Rexroth’s revisionist view of the American avant-
garde in the twentieth century. Whereas in the 1930’s he was part of the vanguard who
resisted the idea that the avant-garde was dead, in the 1960’s he reconsidered his earlier
position. He pointed to the bourgeois provincialism of most American avant-gardists and
thus called into question their presiding values. He also raised again an issue that he was
never able to fully resolve — the issue of the relationship between the artist or writer’s
personal life and his or her art. Was the artist’s work compromised by a compromised
life-style, or did the work stand apart, disengaged from the artist or writer’s personal
failings.

Rexroth usually leaned towards the former proposition, but tended to push the
question into the realm of personality, i.e., that actions had to be interpreted within the
context of the writer’s general personality — yet a personality that could still be largely
discerned within the work. Perhaps in light of the multiple infidelities Linda Hamalian
describes in her biography, Rexroth never wanted to come down firm on this issue in his
theoretical statements, even though he constantly emphasized its relevance in his
polemics.

In 1967 Rexroth wrote the essay, “Who Is Alienated From What?,” which is the
most problematic of the three essays discussed here in terms of expressing a coherent
argument. There is an undercurrent of ennui in the essay, a sort of despairing that is

unique within Rexroth’s oeuvre.

~165-

Yet this essay is also the most withering polemic of them all. It proved to be his
last prolonged argumentative essay on the subject of alienation, and its conclusion was
that America’s capitalist, “predatory” system had produced by the mid-1960’s a society
of almost complete alienation. Rexroth deemed the situation so deep and widespread that
even intellectuals, professional Lefiists, and workers had no idea what had happened to
them. The artists of the supposed avant-garde, like Andy Warhol, produced only for the
well-to-do white population, while

. . millions of mute inglorious people, surfeited with commodities and
commodity relationships, become ever more divorced from their work, their

fellows, their spouses and children, their lives and themselves.” [4]

The essay fails to end on a hopeful note, standing merely as a diagnosis of an
unendurable cultural condition. It leaves us with a Rexroth who is a bit different from the
Rexroth I have wanted to describe in this study, since I hoped to describe him as one of
America’s last great religious romantics, someone who, almost genetically, believed in
the redemption of society through, first, a clear recognition of the enemies of cultural
health, and secondly, through the communication of life-sustaining social values by those
who were best qualified to discern them, the poets.

Whether his diagnosis was ultimately correct or not, his vision was more
clearheaded, consistent and influential than most. And if we allow that the etymological
root of the word religion is “to connect” or “bring together,” Rexroth’s life and work,
centered on the quest to create an organic society through the re-intimization 'of poetry,
constituted a grand religious drama in which he played the part of neither saint nor sinner,

but rather, in every sense of the word, that of seeker.

-166-

-167-

CONCLUSION NOTES

1. Kenneth Rexroth, “Revolt: True and False,” in World Outside the Window: The
Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New Directions Books, 1987), 76.

2. Rexroth, “The Institutionalization of Revolt, The Domestication of Dissent,” in World
Outside the Window, 197,202.

3. Ibid, 205.

4. Rexroth, “Who is Alienated From What?,” in World Outside the Window, 265.

-168-

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