SOURCE: "From the Past, Two Familiar Voices," in The New York Times Book Review, July 28, 1957, p. 5.

Rexroth was one of the pioneers in the revival of jazz and poetry in the San Francisco area during the 1940s and 1950s. In his criticism he has examined such varied topics as Greek mythology, the works of D. H. Lawrence, jazz, and the cabala. In the following excerpt, he asserts Zukofsky's preeminence as an American poet and offers effusive praise for Some Time.

Louis Zukofsky is one of the most important poets of my generation. Like Richard Eberhart, Kenneth Patchen, Muriel Rukeyser, he has been for many years independent of organized literary fashions, a genuinely individual, even idiosyncratic, writer. In 1930 most qualified judges would have put him in the first rank. Then came the Great Depression and World War II and the Proletarians and Reactionaries were having at each other in...