Politics & Power Quote by Kenneth Rexroth

Holiness, Rexroth implies, is radically provincial: it doesn’t travel well as an aesthetic, a brand, or an imported spiritual costume. The line takes a quiet swing at the mid-century Western fascination with Tibetan mysticism and Catholic Italy alike, puncturing the fantasy that sanctity can be acquired by proximity to the “right” tradition or the “right” landscape. Tibet, Italy, America: three loaded shorthand terms for spiritual capital (Buddhist altitude, Catholic old-world gravitas, modern democratic restlessness). He levels them. None of it counts if your life is shabby.

The subtext is moral, but also political. Rexroth, a poet with anarchist sympathies and a deep skepticism of institutions, is wary of outsourced ethics: letting monasteries, churches, or national myths do the hard work of self-governance. “You don’t become a saint” reads like a reprimand aimed at seekers who confuse devotion with virtue, and at cultures that mistake sanctified places for sanctified behavior. The sentence is blunt, almost unpoetic on purpose: it refuses mystique in favor of accountability.

Context matters: Rexroth was a bridge figure in American letters, engaged with Eastern thought yet allergic to spiritual tourism. His “whether” is the key hinge, collapsing exoticism into the same everyday test. Sanctity becomes less about metaphysical credentials and more about ordinary conduct, the unglamorous accumulation of choices. The line works because it denies the reader an escape hatch: no geography, no tradition, no identity makes you good. Only living does.