Rexroth review and contemporary reception

Upon publication of Mexico City Blues, a review by the poet Kenneth Rexroth appeared in The New York Times. Rexroth mainly criticized Kerouac's perceived misunderstanding of Buddhism, referring to his portrayal of Buddha as "a dime-store incense burner", and sardonically concluded that he "always wondered what ever happened to those wax work figures in the old rubber-neck dives in Chinatown. Now we know; one of them at least writes books."^[7] Ginsberg, in observations recorded in Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee's oral history Jack's Book (1978), attributed Rexroth's "damning, terrible" review and his condemnation of the Beat phenomenon to Rexroth feeling vulnerable as a result of the perception that "he had now 'shown his true colors' by backing a group of unholy, barbarian, no-account, no-good people – Beatnik, unwashed, dirty, badmen of letters who didn't have anything on the ball. So he may have felt vulnerable that he originally had been so friendly, literarily, and had backed us up."^[8]

In his monograph on the poem, literary critic James T. Jones describes Rexroth's review as "a model of unethical behavior in print" which, as his standard of a defamatory piece, "consigned one of Kerouac's richest works to temporary obscurity"; he additionally argued that it may have been written in retaliation for perceived poor manners on Kerouac's part, or as an indirect attack on the poet Robert Creeley, a friend of Kerouac's who had an affair with Rexroth's wife.^[9] Creeley himself had published a more positive review in Poetry,^[9] which described the poem as "a series of improvisations, notes, a shorthand of perceptions and memories, having in large part the same word-play and rhythmic invention to be found in [Kerouac's] prose."^[10] The poet Gary Snyder, a friend of Kerouac's, described Mexico City Blues as "the greatest piece of religious poetry I've ever seen."^[11] The poet Anthony Hecht reviewed Mexico City Blues in The Hudson Review, declaring that "the proper way to read this book ... is straight through at one sitting."^[12] Hecht argued that Kerouac's professed aspiration to be a "jazz poet", amplified by his publishers, was an imposture, and that the book was in fact greater if understood as something much more "literary", resembling or drawing on the work of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings and James Joyce.^[13] Hecht concluded that:

there is something valuable and beguiling behind the poetry which is as curiously difficult to get at as if the book were translated from another tongue ... But what seems to me to emerge at the end is a voice of remarkable kindness and gentleness, an engaging and modest good humor and a quite genuine spiritual simplicity...^[14]

Later studies

Jones has described Mexico City Blues as

definitive documentation of Kerouac's attempt to achieve both psychic and literary equilibrium. He endeavored to express in a complex, ritualized song as many symbols of his personal conflicts as he could effectively control by uniting them with traditional literary techniques. In this sense, Mexico City Blues is the most important book Kerouac ever wrote, and it sheds light on all his novels by providing a compendium of the issues that most concerned him as a writer, as well as a model for the transformation of conflict into an antiphonal language.^[15]

In his book Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism (1976), Robert A. Hipkiss criticizes much of Kerouac's poetry, but identifies Mexico City Blues as probably containing Kerouac's best poetry, and praises the 235th Chorus in particular.^[16] Hipkiss compares the 235th Chorus to Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", and interprets the chorus, which reads "How do I know that I'm dead / Because I'm alive / And I got work to do ...", as referring to obligations which give purpose to the narrator's life, but which are "painful and not satisfying". Unlike in Frost's poem, in Mexico City Blues "there is no satisfactory putting aside of the death wish by contemplating the 'miles to go before I sleep.'"^[17] Hipkiss describes the poem as "an expression of the creative impulse very much for its own sake—a refusal of rules of creation and a celebration, in the act, of the spontaneity inherent in creativity."^[18]