From Soapbox to Poetic Mentor Through the Revolution of the Word: The Education of Kenneth Rexroth

by exploring his exposure to the radical circles of anarchists, communists, and socialists in 1920s Chicago. This exposure played a significant role in the development of his mature poetic style, especially with regard to the long poems of the 1940s and 1950s. Although he is mostly associated with the San Francisco poetry scene, Rexroth spent his formative years (13-21) in Chicago, often living on his own as an orphan and a semi-itinerant. His prose memoir An Autobiographical Novel describes his life as a student, artist, poet, newspaper reporter, stagehand, and anarchist soapboxer in Chicago from 1919 to 1927, a period that coincides with the second half of the Chicago Literary Renaissance, prohibition and the resultant gangsterism, the Jazz Age, and the development of High Modernism. 1920s Chicago saw an intensive burgeoning culture of left-wing radicalism at the Dil Pickle club, the at-homes of families such as the Loebs, and the open soapbox forums in Washington Square and elsewhere. These venues exposed local radicals to international socialist and anarchist movements. This paper first describes Rexroth’s experiences with Chicago’s soapbox culture in the 1920s, then analyzes his exploration of various avant-garde poetic strategies in an effort to foster what he called a “fundamental revolution of human sensibility.” Finally, it presents the poetic strategies Rexroth developed for his long poems of the 1940s and 1950s, arguing that they reflect his experience of Chicago’s 1920s soapbox culture and illuminate his connection to and interactions with the Beats. The paper ends by demonstrating that Rexroth’s life offers a prime example of autodidactic education.