SOURCE: "The Threading of the Year," in Parnassus, Vol. 18, No. 2, Fall, 1993, pp. 267-90.

In the following essay, Barber provides analysis of Rexroth's poetry and literary development. According to Barber, "however boldly his personal history carries the impress of beatnik San Francisco and beatific Kyoto, his reckonings with the wilderness bear the telltale marks of Jeffersonian and Emersonian bloodlines."

In his later years Kenneth Rexroth came to assume the very appearance of a weathered Chinese sage. That drooping mustache and the incalculable crinkles round the eyes, the high forehead and the set of the square chin, something about the mixed air of gruffness and whimsy in that battered physiognomy—one feels certain, gazing at the snapshots of this doughty septuagenarian, that we have seen him countless times in the corner of an inkbrushed screen, a venerable figure dwarfed by cliffs and all but lost in swirling mists, ever watchful...