Kenneth Rexroth: Trending quotes (page 3)

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“There have always been those who, though they see tragedy as the outcome of freedom, will nevertheless judge that tragedy is not too high a price to pay.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Herodotus: History (p. 45)
Classics Revisited (1968)

Freedom

“The dumping of the mentally ill, full of these new psychiatric drugs, into the streets is a scandal. It’s been carried furthest in New York, where whole sections of the decayed Upper West Side are being filled with pensioners and psychotic patients on stelazine, lithium carbonate, and everything else under the sun. They can’t diagnose the patient, so they give him the whole psychiatric pharmacopoeia at once, and he walks around in a psychotic trance beautifully painted all over with petrochemicals.”

Kenneth Rexroth

"Pysch Ward" http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/autobio/5.htm
An Autobiographical Novel (1991)

Sun , Painting

“Harvey, Galileo, Copernicus do not seem occult to us, but they did so to their contemporaries, hierophants of the mysteries of Natural Law, revealers of the secrets of a New Order of the Ages. After all, the movement eventually came to be called the Age of Enlightenment.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Shakespeare: The Tempest (p. 132)
Classics Revisited (1968)

Secret , Age , Law , Nature

“What I try with my own stuff is to work the poem to a slow climax through a series of quiet painful dissonances.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Rothenberg and Antin interview (1958)

Pain

“The modern sensibility attempts to drain the contents of experience; these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring — as Sappho says, "More real than real, more gold than gold."”

Kenneth Rexroth

The Greek Anthology (p. 59)
Classics Revisited (1968)

Spring

“You don't become a saint until you lead a good life whether in Tibet or Italy or America.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Rothenberg and Antin interview (1958)

Life

“The basic line in any good verse is cadenced… building it around the natural breath structures of speech.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Rothenberg and Antin interview (1958)

Nature

“Perhaps this is what really happens in life to most good men. They are not crucified. They simply pass through life and then die, and their passing influences just a few people to make them just a little happy.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers (p. 102)
More Classics Revisited (1989)

Life , Men , People , Happiness

“The moral issues with which Marcus struggles would be, as he points out, unchanged whether the universe were mechanical and devoid of meaning or value or ruled by deity or Providence; whether the will were in fact free or determined; whether there were or were not a future life, or any even fugitive rewards and punishments at all.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Marcus Aurelius: The Meditations (p. 82)
Classics Revisited (1968)

Life , Universe , Future

“When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that's news. If they aren't, that's news too.”

Kenneth Rexroth

"The Students Take Over," The Nation (1960); later printed as "Beginnings of a New Revolt" http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/newrevolt.htm, Assays (1961)

“Towards the end of the night, as trucks rumbled
In the streets, you stirred, cuddled to me,
And spoke my name. Your voice was the voice
Of a girl who had never known loss
Of love, betrayal, mistrust, or lie.”

Kenneth Rexroth

In Defense of the Earth (1956), She Is Away

Love , Lie , Girl , Betrayal

“Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Arthur Conan Doyle: "Sherlock Holmes" (p. 120)
More Classics Revisited (1989)

“Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, "What man does with his aloneness."”

Kenneth Rexroth

Tu Fu: Poems (p. 91)
Classics Revisited (1968)

Religion , Art

“The characteristic paranoias of youth — the attribution of intention and duplicity to almost all human behavior. The young suffer terribly from the belief that the people they encounter are most of them up to something and that something has some relation to themselves. Actually, of course, most people just bobble along like apples in a stream. Usually it takes many years of experience to realize this.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Charles Dickens: The Pickwick Papers (p. 102)
More Classics Revisited (1989)

People , Youth , Behavior , Suffering

“With my own group I like to keep it loose. They have to counter rather than go with me. When they stop I like to be moving.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Referring to the jazz musicians who performed along with his readings
Rothenberg and Antin interview (1958)

“Men who live like Casanova are seldom interested in themselves; their egocentricity does not give them time for egotism.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Casanova: History of My Life (p. 153)
Classics Revisited (1968)

Men , Time

“In America we have nothing that takes the place of the gods and goddesses and heroes and demigods of the ancient world. There is nothing to connect us with the soil. We have no mythology. It has never been possible to construct one.”

Kenneth Rexroth

"Home Schooling and Indian Lore"
An Autobiographical Novel (1991)

God , World

“Late at night the horses stumble
Around the camp and I awake.
I lie on my elbow watching
Your beautiful sleeping face
Like a jewel in the moonlight.
If you are lucky and the
Nations let you, you will live
Far into the twenty-first
Century. I pick up the glass
And watch the Great Nebula
Of Andromeda swim like
A phosphorescent amoeba
Slowly around the Pole. Far
Away in distant cities
Fat-hearted men are planning
To murder you while you sleep.”

Kenneth Rexroth

In Defense of the Earth (1956), The Great Nebula of Andromeda

Men , Lie , Beauty , Sleep

“It takes great labor to uncover the convincing simple speech of the heart. Poetic candor comes with hard labor, so even does impetuosity and impudence.”

Kenneth Rexroth

Catullus (p. 28)
More Classics Revisited (1989)

Heart

“Don Quixote, The Tale of Genji, The Dream of the Red Chamber, the Satyricon, these are the world's major works of prose fiction.”

Kenneth Rexroth

"Moll Flanders", in With Eye and Ear (1970), p. 13

World , Dreams