Kenneth Rexroth

Reading Kenneth Rexroth’s complete poetry book. I am interested in style and technique, the expression of sentiment, not so much content. I first encountered Rexroth in his Classics Revisited and More Classics Revisited. Then it was the Chinese and Japanese translations, which critics say is more faithful to his feelings than to the originals. But that element of personal sentiment is important and makes his translations very good poetry. Rexroth is a neo-classicist, not a modernist, meaning that he runs everything through the classics (Greek/Latin, French/English, Chinese/Japanese). This despite his radicalism in other areas of thought. On top of that he probably does capture Tu Fu better than a transliteration.