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It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.

Kenneth Rexroth

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Kenneth Rexroth
Age: 76 †
Born: 1905
Born: December 22
Died: 1982
Died: June 6
Conscientious Objection
Critic
Literary Critic
Musician
Poet
Translator
Writer
South Bend
Indiana
Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth
Racine
Untranslatable
Verse
Commonplace
Verses
Difficult

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Did you know I staged the first performance in America of At the Hawk's Well?
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Erotic love is one of the highest forms of contemplation.
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Man thrives where angels would die of ecstasy and where pigs would die of disgust.
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Lost in loneliness and pain. Black and unendurable, Thinking of you with every Corpuscle of my flesh, in Every instant of night And day.
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We have forgotten love, and Sat lonely beside each other. We have eaten together, Lonely behind our plates, we Have hidden behind children, We have slept together in A lonely bed. Now my heart Turns toward you, awake at last, Penitent, lost in the last Loneliness. Speak to me. Talk To me. Break the black silence.
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The moral issues with which Marcus struggles would be, as he points out, unchanged whether the universe were mechanical and devoid of meaning or value or ruled by deity or Providence whether the will were in fact free or determined whether there were or were not a future life, or any even fugitive rewards and punishments at all.
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Harvey , Galileo , Copernicus do not seem occult to us, but they did so to their contemporaries, hierophants of the mysteries of Natural Law, revealers of the secrets of a New Order of the Ages. After all, the movement eventually came to be called the Age of Enlightenment.
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With my own group I like to keep it loose. They have to counter rather than go with me. When they stop I like to be moving.
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Victorian society was homogeneous without being homogenized. It was, to paraphrase the epigram about Parliament, a society of extreme eccentrics who agreed so well that they could afford to differ.
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The meaning of life can be revealed but never explained.
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Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters.
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As Aristotle said, you have to be an aristocrat or a reactionary to write a good proletarian poem.
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It takes great labor to uncover the convincing simple speech of the heart. Poetic candor comes with hard labor, so even does impetuosity and impudence.
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The free, creative, loving people who shine so brightly in my memory of studios and coffee shops have become models for a huge section of the population. If they in turn can just stay alive in the face of power and terror, they may become the decisive section.
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Crooked cards and straight whiskey, Slow horses and fast women.
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Men who live like Casanova are seldom interested in themselves their egocentricity does not give them time for egotism.
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Art is the reasoned derangement of the senses.
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I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.
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Marriage is the last sacrament available to modern man, and with the terrible destruction of interpersonal relations by capitalism and its war-making State, it is not very available, nor is it surely enduring. But then, vision does not come with guarantees.
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Ex-cons always say, You never know what makes the wheels go round until you've done time in the joint. This is even more true of psychiatric hospitals. It is a perfect mass hypostatization of society, the organization of the Social Lie.
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