SOURCE: A review of The Signature of All Things, in Poetry, Vol. LXXVI, No. 3, June 1950, pp. 159-61.

In this review of The Signature of All Things, Golffing praises the poems for their combination of cosmic feeling and unclouded judgment.

When several years ago I reviewed Mr. Rexroth's The Phoenix and the Tortoise for these pages, I entertained certain doubts about the solidity of his poetic procedure. The free verse flowed a little too freely and at times could scarcely be read as verse; the lines, though crisp throughout, tended to become brittle; and there were obvious faults of style—a fondness for abstract catalogues, an unfleshing of the idea till nothing was left but the bare conceptual bone—which vitiated some of his finest productions. Many of the poems were alive with an almost uncanny insight, while others seemed to meander through channels of intellectual irrelevance or be...