450 Making It New: 1900–1945where the writer made his home. There is nothing strained or artificial about such
lines. “Poetry,” Rexroth insisted, “is the living speech of the people,” elsewhere
adding, “I have spent my life trying to write the way I talk.” Consequently, he
disdained elaborate and elevated rhetoric in favor of clarity of speech, a poised
syntax, and simple, lucid images. As one of his mentors, William Carlos Williams,
observed of Rexroth, “he is no writer in the sense of a word-man. For him words are
sticks and stones to build a house – but it’s a good house.”
Another way of putting it is to say that writing, for Rexroth, was not so much an
imitation of life as a state of being alive. “Poetry,” he suggested, “is vision, the pure
act of sensual communion and contemplation”; it is “the very link of significant
life itself, of the individual to his society, of the individual to his human and
nonhuman environment.” What he means by this is suggested by his “Requiem for
the Spanish Dead,” where Rexroth links himself standing in the Sierras to those
people in the Spanish mountains who are “clutched with cold and huddled together”
in fear as the fascist enemy fly overhead. The solitary poet with his beliefs and the
many men and women suffering and dying for those beliefs in other parts of
the world – and, in particular, the Spanish Republicans – are woven together into
an imagined community. They, in turn, are linked to others: some “emigrants on the
corner” of a street in the poet’s hometown of San Francisco, “holding / A wake for
their oldest child” in which “Voice after voice adds itself to the singing.” There is
interpersonal, imaginative connection between these scattered human subjects:
the poet alone in the Sierras then “Alone on a hilltop in San Francisco,” those in war
offering up a sacrifice in the name of human community, those at the wake struggling
to find a ritual to redeem pain. Such connection is also quietly placed as part of a
greater continuity between human and nonhuman worlds, as the poet evokes
the shared surroundings of each and all: the mountains and hilltops, sea and sky,
and the constellations that seem almost to be “Marching in order” to the songs sung
by the mourners. Occasions of contact like the ones he describes are tiny and
temporary, Rexroth intimates, yet that only makes them all the more precious:
because they are cherished for a moment, before being absorbed into what he
elsewhere calls “the tragic unity of the creative process.” And “Requiem for the
Spanish Dead” is part of that process. The poet’s intimate forms of communication,
the reader is led to believe, make him a part of the ceremony. In this sense, the poem
not only describes a sacrament, it also performs one; it functions, however briefly,
as a moment of union.
As Rexroth saw it, this, the sacramental nature of poetry, had a peculiar signifi-
cance for his contemporaries. “The conviction that ‘nobody wants me, nobody needs
me ...’ is coming to pervade all levels of modern society,” he said. So the problem
was how “in the face of a collapsing system of values ... to refound a spiritual family”:
how to heal the divisions that capitalism engendered, how to reclaim the humanity
and restore the connection with nature that the city and the factory denied. Poetry
was part of the solution since it promoted “the realization ... of universal
responsibility.” “A kelson of the creation is love,” Whitman had proclaimed; Rexroth
agreed, and agreed too with Whitman that poets had a crucial role to play in theGGray_c04.indd 450ray_c 04 .indd 450 8 8/1/2011 7:54:00 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 00 AM