“I had never felt loved by anyone”

Sam Hamill writes a wonderful piece on Kenneth Rexroth here

I didn’t get a lot of Rexroth and needed a dictionary and sometimes an encyclopedia or a library, but he drew me in like no one had before. I knew there was a world in those poems, a vitally expansive world that invited me into it. I loved his anger and his tenderness and weary longing. Some poems reflected on what seemed to me to be an almost eternal life. Who was the “Marthe” for whom he sorrowed so deeply? Lost love? I’d had no love to lose, but I felt, however naively, that I felt his sorrow, his longing. I had never felt loved by anyone and I would live and die in my orphan’s loneliness, I was certain. Rexroth’s poetry often expressed for me what I could not say myself.