SOURCE: "Kenneth Rexroth," in American Writing Today, edited by Richard Kostelanetz, Whitston Publishing Company, 1991, pp. 82-92.

In the following essay, Hall provides an overview of Rexroth's literary accomplishments. According to Evans, Rexroth's poetry "is a poetry of experience and observation, of knowledge and allusion, and finally a poetry of wisdom."

Among Kenneth Rexroth's lesser accomplishments, he appears as a character in two famous novels. James T. Farrell put him in the Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932–35), where he is a kid named Kenny working in a drugstore. With more creative denomination, Jack Kerouac called him Rheinhold Cacoethes in The Dharma Bums, that 1958 Beat Generation testament, where he is the figure we recognize: anarchist, leader of San Francisco's literary community, and poet.

For decades he has written lines like these, setting human life in a context of stone:

       Our campfire is a single light
       Amongst a hundred peaks and waterfalls.
       The...