SOURCE: "The Community of Love: Reading Kenneth Rexroth's Long Poems," in The Centennial Review, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, Winter 1989, pp. 17-31.

In this excerpt, Bartlett traces the development of the quest theme through all of Rexroth's long poems.

James Wright has written that Rexroth "is a great love poet during the most loveless of times," and indeed over the past sixty years Rexroth has written some of the most moving and durable American verse of our century. Undoubtedly, Rexroth's most well-known and accessible poems are his lyrics and his translations. Additionally, however, he wrote five long "philosophical" poems; these comprise his 1968 volume, The Collected Longer Poems. The first of these, The Homestead Called Damascus, was written while he was still in his teens; the last, Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart, was not completed until after the collection itself had gone to New Directions. In between we have "A Prolegomenon...