"The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech"
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Rexroth is quietly throwing a punch at the idea of poetry as decorative language - a museum craft sealed behind “meter” and “rules.” “Cadenced” is his tell: he’s not rejecting form, he’s relocating it from the classroom to the body. The “basic line” isn’t a typographic unit on the page; it’s a unit of lived time, measured by breath, attention, and the way a voice naturally turns when it wants to mean something.
The intent here is pragmatic and radical: if a line can’t be spoken without strain, it’s probably not doing honest work. Rexroth’s subtext is that verse should be accountable to human physiology. Breath becomes a kind of ethics. It forces the poet to write with an ear for pressure, pause, and emphasis - the micro-dramas that make speech persuasive or intimate. That’s why the line “builds” around breath structures: the poem is engineered, but engineered to feel inevitable, like conversation that suddenly sharpens into music.
Context matters. Rexroth sits in mid-century American poetry as a bridge figure: modernist inheritance, jazz-era cadence, translation work steeped in Chinese and Japanese poetics, and an anti-academic stance aligned with (and sometimes skeptical of) the Beats. His breath-based line also anticipates later performance-forward poetries, where the poem’s legitimacy is tested in air, not in theory. The result is an argument for poetry as an embodied art - one that remembers its origin as voiced, heard, and shared.
The intent here is pragmatic and radical: if a line can’t be spoken without strain, it’s probably not doing honest work. Rexroth’s subtext is that verse should be accountable to human physiology. Breath becomes a kind of ethics. It forces the poet to write with an ear for pressure, pause, and emphasis - the micro-dramas that make speech persuasive or intimate. That’s why the line “builds” around breath structures: the poem is engineered, but engineered to feel inevitable, like conversation that suddenly sharpens into music.
Context matters. Rexroth sits in mid-century American poetry as a bridge figure: modernist inheritance, jazz-era cadence, translation work steeped in Chinese and Japanese poetics, and an anti-academic stance aligned with (and sometimes skeptical of) the Beats. His breath-based line also anticipates later performance-forward poetries, where the poem’s legitimacy is tested in air, not in theory. The result is an argument for poetry as an embodied art - one that remembers its origin as voiced, heard, and shared.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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