Kenneth Rexroth quotes

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech. (Kenneth Rexroth)
You don't become a saint until you lead a good life whether in Tibet or Italy or America.
Kenneth Rexroth
It takes great labor to uncover the convincing simple speech of the heart. Poetic candor comes with hard labor, so even does impetuosity and impudence.
Kenneth Rexroth
Man thrives where angels would die of ecstasy and where pigs would die of disgust.
Kenneth Rexroth
Perhaps this is what really happens in life to most good men. They are not crucified. They simply pass through life and then die, and their passing influences just a few people to make them just a little happy.
Kenneth Rexroth
There have always been those who, though they see tragedy as the outcome of freedom, will nevertheless judge that tragedy is not too high a price to pay.
Kenneth Rexroth
Ex-cons always say, "You never know what makes the wheels go round until you've done time in the joint." This is even more true of psychiatric hospitals. It is a perfect mass hypostatization of society, the organization of the Social Lie.
Kenneth Rexroth
The free, creative, loving people who shine so brightly in my memory of studios and coffee shops have become models for a huge section of the population. If they in turn can just stay alive in the face of power and terror, they may become the decisive section.
Kenneth Rexroth
The holiness of the real Is always there, accessible In total immanence. The nodes Of transcendence coagulate In you, the experiencer, And in the other, the lover.
Kenneth Rexroth
Marriage is the last sacrament available to modern man, and with the terrible destruction of interpersonal relations by capitalism and its war-making State, it is not very available, nor is it surely enduring. But then, vision does not come with guarantees.
Kenneth Rexroth
Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters. (Kenneth Rexroth)
You learn nothing if you carry with you a journalistic system of values, which is invented to save reporters from experience.
Kenneth Rexroth
Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ.
Kenneth Rexroth
It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.
Kenneth Rexroth
The dumping of the mentally ill, full of these new psychiatric drugs, into the streets is a scandal. It's been carried furthest in New York, where whole sections of the decayed Upper West Side are being filled with pensioners and psychotic patients on stelazine, lithium carbonate, and everything else under the sun. They can't diagnose the patient, so they give him the whole psychiatric pharmacopoeia at once, and he walks around in a psychotic trance beautifully painted all over with petrochemicals.
Kenneth Rexroth
The modern sensibility attempts to drain the contents of experience; these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring - as Sappho says, "More real than real, more gold than gold."
Kenneth Rexroth
The moral issues with which Marcus struggles would be, as he points out, unchanged whether the universe were mechanical and devoid of meaning or value or ruled by deity or Providence; whether the will were in fact free or determined; whether there were or were not a future life, or any even fugitive rewards and punishments at all.
Kenneth Rexroth
When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that's news. If they aren't, that's news too.
Kenneth Rexroth
Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, "What man does with his aloneness."
Kenneth Rexroth
With my own group I like to keep it loose. They have to counter rather than go with me. When they stop I like to be moving.
Kenneth Rexroth
Men who live like Casanova are seldom interested in themselves; their egocentricity does not give them time for egotism. (Kenneth Rexroth)
Did you know I staged the first performance in America of At the Hawk's Well?
Kenneth Rexroth
Harvey, Galileo, Copernicus do not seem occult to us, but they did so to their contemporaries, hierophants of the mysteries of Natural Law, revealers of the secrets of a New Order of the Ages. After all, the movement eventually came to be called the Age of Enlightenment.
Kenneth Rexroth
The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, takes responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and avoids it. Without the hidden conspiracy of goodwill, society would not endure an hour.
Kenneth Rexroth
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 One brief instant it was not blind, nor Trapped, not crippled. For one heart beat the Heart was free and moved itself. O love, 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, My heart beat one free beat and sent Through all my flesh the blood of truth.
Kenneth Rexroth