Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1905. His childhood was hard: his father drank, his mother was often ill, and both had died by the time he was a young teenager, when he went to live with an aunt in Chicago. He never finished school. Instead he educated himself in the libraries, jazz clubs and radical bookshops of Chicago, and he read more widely than almost any poet of his century.

In 1927 he moved to San Francisco, and he stayed for most of the next forty years. He was an anarchist and a pacifist, and during the Second World War he was a conscientious objector who worked in a hospital rather than fight. He climbed and camped in the Sierra Nevada, and some of his finest poems are about lying under the stars in the mountains, thinking about love, death and the long history of the earth.

By the 1950s Rexroth was the elder statesman of San Francisco poetry. He held weekly gatherings at his apartment, reviewed books on the radio station KPFA, and championed younger poets. On October 7, 1955, at the Six Gallery, he was the master of ceremonies for the reading at which Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl.” He has often been called the father of the Beats, a title he did not particularly enjoy.

His greatest gift to readers may be his translations. In One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1955) and One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (1956), he turned ancient poems into clear, quiet American English, especially the poems of the eighth-century Chinese poet Du Fu, whom he loved above all others. Generations of readers, and poets, have met Chinese and Japanese poetry for the first time in his small New Directions paperbacks.

He spent his last years in Santa Barbara, and died there in 1982.