Kenneth Rexroth citations (65 citations, Page 2)

My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild:
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
—Matthew Arnold, "To a Friend" http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/A/ArnoldMatthew/verse/strayedreveller/friend.html from The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849)
Misattributed

“As we turn over the pages of nineteenth century literature, we are constantly confronted with the question of alienation. Baudelaire, Marx, Kierkegaard, Chateaubriand, Cardinal Newman — it does not matter whether the voice comes from the Left or the Right; all are agreed in their rejection of the values of the prevailing ethic. Yet we never get a clear definition of alienation: what is man alienated from, and why? Perhaps it is precisely the democratic society, the growing affluence and education, that have revealed the natural state of man — much as the development of medicine has enabled greater accuracy of diagnosis, with the resultant tremendous increase in the record of certain diseases. Perhaps the discovery of human self-alienation was simply a statistical refinement made possible by the spread of the privileges of culture to the middle classes.”

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Kenneth Rexroth

Gustave Flaubert: A Sentimental Education (p. 187)
Classics Revisited (1968)

“You learn nothing if you carry with you a journalistic system of values, which is invented to save reporters from experience.”

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Kenneth Rexroth

"Cub Reporter" http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/autobio/3.htm#Cub%20Reporter
An Autobiographical Novel (1991)

“The holiness of the real
Is always there, accessible
In total immanence. The nodes
Of transcendence coagulate
In you, the experiencer,
And in the other, the lover.”

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Kenneth Rexroth

"Time Is the Mercy of Eternity" - The title of this poem is derived from a line by William Blake : "Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time's swiftness Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment.")
In Defense of the Earth (1956)

“Marriage is the last sacrament available to modern man, and with the terrible destruction of interpersonal relations by capitalism and its war-making State, it is not very available, nor is it surely enduring. But then, vision does not come with guarantees.”

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Kenneth Rexroth

"World War II" http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/autobio/6.htm
An Autobiographical Novel (1991)

“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.”

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Kenneth Rexroth

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

“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.”

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Kenneth Rexroth

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

“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.”

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Kenneth Rexroth

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

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

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Kenneth Rexroth

Rothenberg and Antin interview (1958)

“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."”

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Kenneth Rexroth

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

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

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Kenneth Rexroth

Rothenberg and Antin interview (1958)

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

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Kenneth Rexroth

Rothenberg and Antin interview (1958)

“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.”

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Kenneth Rexroth

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

“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.”

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Kenneth Rexroth

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

“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.”

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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)