SOURCE: "Natural Supernaturalism: The Nature Poetry of Kenneth Rexroth," in The Literary Review, Vol. 26, No. 3, Spring 1983, pp. 405-18.

In this excerpt, Gutierrez discusses Rexroth's nature poetry.

"The clarity of purposively realized objectivity is the most supernatural of all visions."
Kenneth Rexroth, Introduction to D.H. Lawrence's Selected Poems

"As long as we are lost in the world of purpose we are not free."
Kenneth Rexroth, The Dragon and The Unicorn

Probably there is little nature verse of any value that is simply about nature. Nature-meditation verse is perhaps a more accurate description for much of the important poetry dealing with nature as a medium for exploration of the self and the world. Yet even that phrase is too tame for the intensities and depths of meaning achieved by some poets in confronting the natural environment. Wordsworth's The Prelude is formidably subtle in, among other things, the reflexivities it...