Most students of twentieth century American poetry know the work of Kenneth Rexroth, yet few associate him with the southern Sierra Nevada. Missing this connection, however, leaves the man incomplete. By his own account, much of Rexroth’s creativity flowed directly from his deep associations with the wilderness of the High Sierra.
Rexroth came to California and its wildlands as a young man. He had been born in 1905 in Indiana, and his youth did little to expose him to the world of nature. All that changed in 1924 when, while hitchhiking across the country, he took a seasonal job with the Forest Service in the North Cascades region of Washington. The empty, wild land entranced him, and he would regularly return to wilderness for the rest of his life.
Rexroth married Andrée Ducher in 1927, and the young couple spent much of their first summer together in the High Sierra. For the next decade, they returned again and again to the Sequoia and Kings Canyon region, usually renting a burro to support their adventures.
Kenneth and Andrée ranged widely through the parks region. In his poetry, Rexroth refers to time spent in Deadman Canyon and to visiting the Kern River. Other works mention visits to Knapsack Pass (Dusy Basin) and the Tablelands. A section of the epic-length poem “The Dragon and the Unicorn” traces an eastward progress along the High Sierra Trail.
Rexroth had an especially strong bond with the Kings Canyon in those days before the road into the canyon was completed and automobile tourism invaded the gorge. He wrote later of the joy of spending weeks in the canyon in the fall and having the place entirely to himself and his wife.
Andrée’s health deteriorated in the middle 1930s, and their trips together into the mountains came to an end. They separated, and she died shortly thereafter. The memories remained strong, however, and for the rest of his life Rexroth wrote again and again about the mountain time he had spent with Andrée.
Rexroth went on to become a seminal figure in American literature. His poetry appeared in dozens of books and inspired a new generation of American writers. The beat poets of the 1950s considered Rexford their mentor, and when Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl” in San Francisco in October 1955, it was Rexroth who presided over the evening.
In later years he taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As late as 1967, however, he was still summering in the backcountry of Sequoia and Kings Canyon. As he put it in 1960 in a newspaper essay:
“I have always felt I was most myself in the mountains. There I have done the bulk of what is called my creative work. At least it is in the mountains that I write most of my poetry.”
Earlier, as the Second World War began, Rexroth wrote in “Strength Through Joy:”
Coming back over the col between
Isosceles Mountain and North Palisade,
I stop at the summit and look back
At the storm gathering over the white peaks
Of the Whitney group and the colored Kaweahs.
September, nineteen thirty-nine.
This is the last trip to the mountains
This autumn, possibly the last trip ever.
The storm clouds rise up the mountainside,
Lightning batters the pinnacles above me,
The clouds beneath the pass are purple
And I see rising through them from the valleys
And the cities a cold murderous flood…
In Rexroth’s poems we often see the Sierra shining through – towering above all our lives.
© Wm. Tweed
“Strength Through Joy” comes from The Phoenix and the Tortoise, © 1944 by New Directions Publishing Corporation.