Kenneth Rexroth Quotes - Page 2

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.

Erotic love is one of the highest forms of contemplation.

Art is the reasoned derangement of the senses.

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

Love is the garment of knowledge.

Bohemia is a commune in which the Revolution is over and everyone is a member of the aristocracy

As Aristotle said, you have to be an aristocrat or a reactionary to write a good proletarian poem.

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

An entomologist is not a bug.

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.

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.

It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

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

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.

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.

Did you know I staged the first performance in America of At the Hawk's Well?