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

Don Quixote, The Tale of Genji, The Dream of the Red Chamber, the Satyricon, these are the world's major works of prose fiction.

— Kenneth Rexroth

The holiness of the realAnd in the other, the lover.

— Kenneth Rexroth

All night I lay awake beside you, Never ceases to astonish me.

— Kenneth Rexroth

Towards the end of the night, as trucks rumbled Of love, betrayal, mistrust, or lie.

— Kenneth Rexroth

In the star-filled dark we cookAround our table like fireflies.

— Kenneth Rexroth

Late at night the horses stumbleTo murder you while you sleep.

— Kenneth Rexroth

What I try with my own stuff is to work the poem to a slow climax through a series of quiet painful dissonances.

— 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

I have no interest in Kerouac whatsoever. I've done my stint for him. As far as I'm concerned, Kerouac is what Madison Avenue wants a rebel to be. That isn't my kind of rebel.

— Kenneth Rexroth

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

You can’t become a saint by taking dope, stealing your friends’ typewriters, giving girls chancres, not supporting your wife and children, and then reading St. John of the Cross. All of that, when it’s happened before, has typified the collapse of civilization … and today the social fabric is falling apart so fast, it makes your head swim.

— 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

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

Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, "What man does with his aloneness."

— 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

Men who live like Casanova are seldom interested in themselves; their egocentricity does not give them time for egotism.

— 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

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

It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.

— 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

The characteristic paranoias of youth — the attribution of intention and duplicity to almost all human behavior. The young suffer terribly from the belief that the people they encounter are most of them up to something and that something has some relation to themselves. Actually, of course, most people just bobble along like apples in a stream. Usually it takes many years of experience to realize this.

— 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

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

In America we have nothing that takes the place of the gods and goddesses and heroes and demigods of the ancient world. There is nothing to connect us with the soil. We have no mythology. It has never been possible to construct one.

— Kenneth Rexroth

I remember the first time I ever saw otter play and slide down a slippery bank into the water. Old Billy knew where they were and took me to them. We sat down silently behind some bushes on the bank of an Indiana stream and pretty soon out came a family of otter and climbed up on the bank and slid down the mud slide over and over again like little children. Nothing looks funnier than an otter having a good time, unless it’s a sea otter, which looks even more cherubic.

— 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

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

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

I was giving a reading at some university. Down in the front row of the auditorium was a young lady in a leather microskirt and a leather microbolero, tied with a leather bootlace, and nothing else whatever. I said, "I have an extremely wide repertory. What would you like — sex, revolution, or mysticism?" She looked up and said quietly, "What’s the difference?"

— Kenneth Rexroth