REXROTH, Kenneth. Thirty Spanish Poems of Love and Exile. San Francisco, City Lights Books. 1956.
Small 4to. Saddlestitched with two staples; stiff red paper wrapper in red lettered and in black; yellow handprinted wraparound label in yellow with lettering in black; pp. [6], 31, [3]; yellow wrap around label slightly undone on back cover; initials of 'ECR' penned in ink to top of front wrapper; slight rubbing to binding; otherwise near fine edition.
First edition, first printing, one of 1,000 copies designed by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
"This morning, my love, we are twenty years old..." ("Homecoming of Love on the Sands" by Rafael Alberti).
Heralded "Godfather of the Beats", Kenneth Rexroth was a prolific translator of foreign verse (not only contemporary but ancient language) and a crucial supporter of the Beats movement. As Alfred Kazin rather dramatically proclaimed in Contemporaries, "Kenneth Rexroth seemed to appear everywhere at their side like the shade of Virgil guiding Dante through the underworld". He would go onto criticise the iconic cohort, to whom he never claimed full affiliation, as they became celebrities of literature, but he condemned conventional academia and other institutional systems and, as an extremely active anarchist, was a conscientous objector during World War II. He appears as a character in Jack Kerouac's The Dhama Bums and spent the last years of his life translating female poetry from Japanese and Chinese poets.
Thirty Poems of Love and Exile compiles the poetry of six Spanish poets in various states of displacement and, as Rexroth reiterates in his Introduction, "Only some of these poets were born in Spain. None of them live there today".
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