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The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke

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I have always been transfixed by this man's poetry. Roethke possessed a way of speaking in his poetry that was both confessional and deeply spiritual. He was beyond doubt one of the greatest American poets of the 20th Century. Some of his poems, like Journey to the Interior, The Far Field, The Lost Son, and so many others create an almost religious experience in the reader.

Roethke suffered from bipolar disorder throughout most of his life, and this experience (extreme emotional ups and downs) colored his vision of the world around him. But there is no trace of self-pity, and no great emphasis on depression or death. Instead, love, time, age, and the mystery of life are the themes of his poetry. He saw life as a religious experience, and was essentially a pantheist at heart.

This is a book to give as a gift to some Seeker, if you are lucky enough to know someone who fits into that category. It's a book to guide, inform, and heal a life.

"A late rose ravages the casual eye," writes Roethke in A Walk in Late Summer, "a blaze of being on a central stem." In such images we see the symbols of nature fully tapped in modern poetry -- and tapped in American English, in fresh, vivid language that overpowers the reader with its grace and presence. The poetry of Theodore Roethke is written by a man profoundly alive -- skirting the edge of suicide, losing his voice in the awe of love, reeling wildly in the throes of "the pure fury," and looking at last with calm eyes into infinity and his own undoing in the Far Field. Roethke was a true descendent of Whitman where the latter wrote "This is no book / Who touches this touches a man." But Roethke's poetry moves us as much by its lyrical language as by the power and wisdom of its experience. Roethke himself was, as represented by his art alone, a "blaze of being."

Among Roethke's contributions to literature are his poems that treat depression. Far from letting his manic episodes paralyze him, he used them to write some his most intense poetry. "In a Dark Time" is one of the immortal poems of the 20th century, worthy to be set aside a Van Gogh painting. Roethke was not alone in treating these subjects: two other Pulitzer Prize-winning poets of his time, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, learned from him and wrote about similar themes. But Roethke's writing stands out in two ways from these poets and other poets the 50's and 60's.

One is the unity of his work and vision -- this Collected Poems traces a single spiritual journey beginning with his childhood memories of the greenhouse, and ending somewhere among "the windy cliffs of forever", last visions tragically cut short by his early death. Between those points are rendered all of the experiences of his life -- as he wrote in his first poem, "my heart keeps open-house." But he never fails to interpret these experiences and understand their significance in the larger picture of his life and poetry. Unlike so much of the poetry of Sylvia Plath and other Confessional poets, Roethke never demands that you read his biography to understand his symbolism. Rather, his symbols develop among his poems to form a kind of mythology: his recurring symbols include stones, fire, light, "the small," and the spirit.

The other difference between Roethke and other poets of his time is his technique. Roethke is never obscure; he always writes in fresh language, avoiding cliches, although his symbols are indeed personal and take time to understand. Roethke's craft is "strict and pure," such that even the staunchest defenders of Sylvia Plath have confessed that Roethke's writing is more disciplined. The Deep Image movement of poets like Robert Bly and James Wright is influenced by the kind of symbolism found throughout Roethke's poetry, and those writers have acknowledged their debt to him. Roethke retained rhyme and meter in a time when all the conventions of poetry were being ripped apart; and he did so with a consummate technical skill not to be found in the Beatniks or in the Black Mountain poets. Roethke's ear for poetry is much more sensitive than that of other poets of his time. We are gagged by the lyricism in lines like

"She came toward me in the flowing air,
A shape of change, encircled by its fire."
("The Dream")

"When all
My waterfall
Fancies sway away
From me, in the sea's silence..."
("Her Time")

"O love, you who hear
The slow tick of time
In your sea-buried ear..."
("Song")


The most exhilarating of all these are Roethke's love poems in "Words for the Wind", which justly won the Bollingen Prize and the National Book Award. These poems are unmatched for eloquence and spiritual intensity -- and it's a damn shame that modern anthologies do not reprint them, aside from the famous "I Knew a Woman." For it is in these love poems that Roethke's soul soars, and his poetic power is fully realized.

"She knew the grammar of least motion."
("The Dream")

"Light listened when she sang."
("Light Listened")

"I measure time by how a body sways."
("I Knew a Woman").


Theodore Roethke achieved greatness in art by having the courage to confront the most intense human experiences and the skill to craft them into some of the most eloquent poems of his time. If there is ONE modern poet you will read, let it be Roethke. His "Collected Poems" is a must for every poet and every lover of poetry.

I love Roethke and I can't stop loving him. His words, phrases, rhythms, thoughts, feelings and meditations stick with me. I will go a year or two without reading his work, but he is still there shaping the way I see the world. His poetry occupies the same space in my mind as Brian Eno's transcendent work On Land. It's meditative, quiet, and joyful and yet, sweaty, ominous, and alarming, all at the same time.

The Far Field (North American Sequence) incarnates this feeling for me. Roethke meditates on his own mortality (don't all poets?) and finds a vast encompassing love for life. A love not only for the "growing rose," but also, seemingly for the summer heat and the stench of dead buffalo, "their damp fur drying in the sun." He sees beauty in nature but also "redolent disorder" and he calls life "This ambush, this silence."

I agree with him.

Roethke proclaims a love for life which is similar to Nietzsche's concept of the Eternal Recurring. That is, he has learned to love life, the good and the evil, to such an extent that he would have it recur again and again, eternally. This kind of love is not a love for evil, rather it is a willingness to sit behind the window of one's pain and still look out and see the beauty. This takes great courage.

Roethke's influences are obvious. What American poet could escape Whitman and his lineage, Thoreau, Henry Miller, etc.? I'm sure he read his fair share of Nietzsche. I also note, Roethke's style seems to have changed drastically towards the end of his life. I believe this was probably partly in reaction to the Beats. However, in my opinion he swallows the Beats whole and makes something new of them. Roethke's verse also periodically has the ring of Wallace Stevens, and sometimes Robert Frost. Some of his verses sound like bad seventies self-help schtick; "I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form," etc.

I only go into these criticisms so I can make a larger point. Roethke's metaphors are sometimes, seemingly, larger than their implication, sometimes they are derivative, sometimes clunky. But, his work, for me, has an almost Biblical air to it. By this I mean his work resonates on a mythological level. His ideas are broad and go to the heart without ignoring the blood and stench of life. At the same time, yes, his ideas are broad, however, his details, while often being merely enumerative, are true. By this I mean, they come from a real eye roving across a real landscape. He is, at once, strange and familiar.

I would hope that Academia would catch up with Roethke. It seems that he is being unfairly ignored.

Theodore Roethke is a poet I discovered while reading an anthology in college as a freshman. Writing about a wide continuum of subjects that range from the natural landscape to the convoluted paths of love, Roethke's poems are compelling and still applicable to our time. However, he does have a tendency to be quite abstruse, especially in such poems as "Forcing House" and "O Lull Me, Lull Me." Roethke's persistent examination of nature and its meaning to him, though, is engaging and imaginative; it was my most favorite aspect of his poems. Take, for example, the following lines from "The Waking" (different than the vilanelle, this one is in The Lost Son): "And all the waters/ Of all the streams/ Sang in my veins/ That summer day." The poet's intricate observations, too, make his poetry powerful and a treat for the senses. If you are patient and don't mind reading his poems a few times over to get their jist, Roethke is for you.

This collection contains Roethke's "Words for the Wind", one of the great c20 collections by any poet. Everything Roethke touched came instantly to life. He's ignored for his classicism, so was Ravel. No matter. When it comes time to decide what a poem is, they'll turn to Roethke. The poems from Words for the Wind deal in heart stopping beauty, refinement of form, and the pleasures of a uniquely great mind in play.
Dont miss it.

Theodore Roethke lived a life of inner turmoil and often outward beauty, from growing up on his father's farm to teaching at Bennington College and suffering mental illness, his poems at once recognize the yearning for more than the worldly as well as the beauty and tragedy of the physical beings we are. His children's poems (not only for children) bring an Ogden Nash-esque primitive and humorous view that makes these themes in his other poems more noticeable. All in all, Roethke was one of the great twentieth century American poets, and these poems bear this out.

At first, I was heitant to delve into this author's work simply because I'd never heard of him in all my wide readings of poetry, both modern and old.

Don't make the same mistake I did. Roethke WILL NOT disappoint you. "The Lost Son" has become my new favourite poem, and this book goes with me perpetually, and will until I finish every line in it.

Exquisite.

Roethke's reputation among serious readers of poetry is secure, so I'll make a comment on the formal side of things. In addition to being an impeccable craftsman of formal (metrical and rhymed) poetry, Roethke has given us some of the best free verse in the language. The poems on his father's greenhouse demonstrate Roethke's own critical comment that the best free verse has the ghost of formal verse behind it. "The Lost Son" is equally impressive. Whether you're interested in formal or free verse, then, Roethke is an excellent poet.

Theodore Roethke's poetry is obscure, confusing, sometimes nonsensical, often filled with inexplicable sexual imagery, from time to time impenetrable to the reader. However, in spite of, or perhaps because of, these things, Roethke is one of the finest American poets of the 20th century. This was a poet who wrote utterly nonpretentiously, putting together words for himself as much as for the world, writing to solve his own questions more than to show off to the reader that he had something to prove.

Roethke was a keen observer of the links between the physical world and the metaphysical, and poems such as "Meditation at Oyster River" show a profound understanding of Man's place in Nature even in the mundane-ness of the life of the individual. Other pieces, such as his sequence "The Lost Son," link personal events to common human experience.

Roethke is not an easy poet, but he deserves recognition for his style and observations, and I would recommend him to anyone who seeks good poetry.

When I think of poetry I put Roethke right next to all the masters
that I love: Keats, Shakespeare, Thomas. Roethke separates himself by
his immersion full thrust into our world. For him there is no membrane between
his words and nature. Plants, people, provide pictures for his unerring
rhythm. While chilling me to the bone, he charms me with wit. When I wish
to shake myself out my doldrums I read Roethke. His poems have a courage
of a pioneer that goes alone. Like Keats said "he ne're is crowned with immortality
Who fears to follow where any voices lead."