The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke

by Theodore Roethke

This paperback edition contains the complete text of Roethke's seven published volumes plus sixteen previously uncollected poems. Included are his Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners The Walking, Words for the Wind, and The Far Field.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, Literature, 20th Century, American, The United States Of America

411 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

American poet Theodore Roethke published short lyrical works in The Waking (1953) and other collections.

Rhythm and natural imagery characterized volumes of Theodore Huebner Roethke. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book, The Waking. Roethke wrote of his poetry: The greenhouse "is my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth." From childhood experiences of working in floral company of his family in Saginaw, Roethke drew inspiration. Beginning is 1941 with Open House, the distinguished poet and teacher published extensively; he received two National Book Awards among an array of honors. In 1959, Yale University awarded him the prestigious Bollingen Prize. Roethke taught at Michigan State College, (present-day Michigan State University) and at colleges in Pennsylvania and Vermont before joining the faculty of the University of Washington at Seattle in 1947.

Reviews

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roethke's historical significance rests both on his established place in the American canon and on his influence over a subsequent generation of award-winning poets that includes Robert Bly, James Dickey, Carolyn Kizer, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, William Stafford, David Wagoner, and James Wright. 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. 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. 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. All in all, Roethke was one of the great twentieth century American poets, and these poems bear this out.
Like Keats said "he ne're is crowned with immortality
Who fears to follow where any voices lead."

[Stephanie ~~ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Twenty-five years ago my favorite professor gifted me a copy of this collection of Roethke's poetry. I lent it to a good friend, and when she passed away, it was beside her bed. Her mother kept it as a token from me.

A few months ago I was walking and the poem, "Elegy For Jane" (which is my favorite of these poems) popped into my mind. Line after line, it came back to me. Oddly powerful, Roethke's writing is for any reader. The moment I returned home from my walk, I ordered myself another copy of Theodore Roethke's "The Collected Poems."

If you don't usually read poetry, I invite you to give this a try. Perhaps you've recently become interested in current poets, but haven't heard of Roethke? This book is the perfect collection for anyone. Truly. Below is a small excerpt from my favorite, "Elegy For Jane." (Written by Roethke about a student of his who passed away as the result of being thrown by a horse).

--------------------------------------------------------------------

"If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover."

© Theodore Roethke

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contents

OPEN HOUSE - 1941
THE LOST SON AND OTHER POEMS - 1948
From PRAISE TO THE END! - 1951
From WORDS FOR THE WIND - 1958
From I AM! SAYS THE LAMB - 1961
THE FAR FIELD - 1964
PREVIOUSLY UNCOLLECTED POEMS

Favourite poems -

To my Sister
Slow Season
For an Amorous Lady
The Gentle
Double Feature
Bring the day!
I knew a Woman
The Sensualists
Love's progress
The Longing
Her Words
Wish for a Young Wife
A Rouse for Stevens

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book #1: Open House (1941)

In "Prognosis" Roethke uses these lines to show the impact of parents:

Though the devouring mother cry, "Escape me? Never---"
And the honeymoon be spoiled by a father's ghost,

Again in "The Premonition" he speaks of his father:

But when he stood up, that face
Was lost in a maze of water.

And here is his famous poem about a bat:

The Bat

By day the bat is cousin to the mouse.
He likes the attic of an aging house.

His fingers make a hat about his head.
His pulse beat is so slow we think him dead.

He loops in crazy figures half the night
Among the trees that face the corner light.

But when he brushes up against a screen,
We are afraid of what our eyes have seen:

For something is amiss or out of place
When mice with wings can wear a human face.

And finish off his first book with this one called "Night Journey":

Now as the train bears west,
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
And from my Pullman berth
I stare into the night
While others take their rest.
Bridges of iron lace,
A suddenness of trees,
A lap of mountain mist
All cross my line of sight,
Then a bleak wasted place,
And a lake below my knees.
Full on my neck I feel
The straining at a curve;
My muscles move with steel,
I wake in every nerve.
I watch a beacon swing
From dark to blazing bright;
We thunder through ravines
And gullies washed with light.
Beyond the mountain pass
Mist deepens on the pane;
We rush into a rain
That rattles double glass.
Wheels shake the roadbed stone,
The pistons jerk and shove,
I stay up half the night
To see the land I love.

Book #2: The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

Roethke has several memorable poems in Part I about helping his father in with gardening.

Then in Part II one of his greatest poems:

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

One of my favorite opening lines of his is in "Dolor":

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils.

Book #2: Praise to the End! (1951)

In this collection, Roethke wrote mostly what I would call today WTF poems.

Book #3: The Waking (1953)

It includes this great poem:

Elegy for Jane
(My student, thrown by a horse)

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

And, of course, probably his most famous and perhaps best poem:

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Book #4: Words for the Wind (1958)

An unusual collection of children's poems and love poems and death poems. It does have this great love poem:

I Knew a Woman

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek).

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).

Book #5: I Am! Says the Lamb (1961)

Filled with fun nonsense poems like this one:

The Donkey


I had a Donkey, that was all right,
But he always wanted to fly my Kite;
Every time I let him, the String would bust.
Your Donkey is better behaved, I trust.

Book #6: The Far Field (1964)

Great animal poem:

The Meadow Mouse
1

In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking
Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow,
Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick
Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in,
Cradled in my hand,
A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,
His absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse,
His feet like small leaves,
Little lizard-feet,
Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,
Wriggling like a minuscule puppy.

Now he's eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from his
bottle-cap watering-trough--
So much he just lies in one corner,
His tail curled under him, his belly big
As his head; his bat-like ears
Twitching, tilting toward the least sound.

Do I imagine he no longer trembles
When I come close to him?
He seems no longer to tremble.

2

But this morning the shoe-box house on the back porch is empty.
Where has he gone, my meadow mouse,
My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm? --
To run under the hawk's wing,
Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,
To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat.

I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,--
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.

And another:

The Pike

The river turns,
Leaving a place for the eye to rest,
A furred, a rocky pool,
A bottom of water.

The crabs tilt and eat, leisurely,
And the small fish lie, without shadow, motionless,
Or drift lazily in and out of the weeds.
The bottom-stones shimmer back their irregular striations,
And the half-sunken branch bends away from the gazer's eye.

A scene for the self to abjure!-
And I lean, almost into the water,
My eye always beyond the surface reflection;
I lean, and love these manifold shapes,
Until, out from a dark cove,
From beyond the end of a mossy log,
With one sinuous ripple, then a rush,
A thrashing-up of the whole pool
The pike strikes.

Finally ends with Uncollected Poems. A collection of poems by a master.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The highway ribboning out in a straight thrust to the North,
To the sand dunes and fish flies, hanging, thicker than moths,
Dying brightly under the street lights sunk in coarse concrete,
The towns with their high pitted road-crowns and deep gutters,
Their wooden stores of silvery pine and weather-beaten red courthouses
An old bridge below with a buckled iron railing, broken by some idiot plunger;
Underneath, the sluggish water running between weeds, broken wheels, tires, stones.
And all flows past—
The cemetery with two scrubby trees in the middle of the prairie,
The dead snakes and muskrats, the turtles gasping in the rubble,
The spikey purple bushes in the winding dry creek bed—
The floating hawks, the jackrabbits, the grazing cattle—
I am not moving but they are.

Excerpt from the poem Journey to the Interior by Theodore Roethke

The following scenario has played out for me countless times.

I read a famous work of an author (or poet) and most emphatically do not fall in love with it. But then I read another story by the same author and I’m blown away.

For example:

Larry McMurtry - I loved Terms of Endearment but Lonesome Dove not so much.

Ernest Hemingway - I loved the Killers but The Old Man and the Sea not so much

and countless others ...

Now I can add Theodore Roethke to this esteemed list.

I did not much care for the first 200 pages of poems in this book, but then came a short posthumous collection of poems called the Far Field. To use a cliche it spoke to me. Coming from Roethke’s travels around North America the poems are complete with imagery and observations of flora, fauna, and the natural world. My favorite poems were the following:

1. The Longing
2. The Meditation at Oyster River
3. Journey to the Interior
4. The Far Field
5. The Meadow Mouse

5 stars for the Far Field. Maybe 3.5 stars for the rest.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my "desert island" books. I once had three copies because I kept loaning it out to friends who took too long to return it. The whole book is wonderful, but the poems from "The Lost Son" collection are my favorites.

[Storm · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best part about Theodore Roethke's really good poetry (and actually most of it..) is that there are lines and instresses and endings that just defy any attempt by the mind to understand how he thought them up, how he felt them through; I can see no seams, no evidence whatsoever of how it was constructed. They hit they slide through so smooth that they instantly become as unnatural and as natural as a foot's movements with a shoe on.

But the most amazing part is that.. it's all such simple language, and so few words are used—without ever treading into being too vague or overly opaque—that I feel he could have written each poem about a leaf and got'damn pebble in stream nowhere on nowhere's eve and it would still be easily as remarkable, still be as perfectly quaint, dark, metaphysical, and tenderly light as it all is..


P.S. Roethke's like Whitman distilled, but like Dickinson unfurled just enough more. Read it. And just sit there for the sake of it. Or don't. Who cares, it's your life, no one can make you read. Do what you will.

[Mert · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5 Stars (%79/100)

The fact that this amazing poet has only 7200 total ratings in Goodreads is really sad in my opinion. More people should be familiar with Roethke's poetry. He had lots of problems in his life and this really affected his writing style. The poems are very sad and make you feel hopeless. Also, the imagery is great in all of his poems. My favourites are: "The Waking," (of course) and "Wish for a Young Wife." (He was dying and he wished a healthy and long life for his young wife...)

[Cary · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wordless silence between words. An underrated poet in my mind, wouldn't doubt that he'd all but been forgotten had he been any less than brilliantly innovative. You want deep image? His stick runs deep. The river is wide. The way home for Roethke is back through the womb, back into blood. Additionally, if you've read My Papa's Waltz only, you have no idea, alright?

[John Reis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few of his love poems are quite good. But to be honest, this was not for me. There is a sense of futility or pointlessness to many of these poems. They do provide a little motivation. You want to get up and do something, anything, after reading dozen in a row.

There are birds and there are walls and they are everywhere in this collection.
My favorite poems were his later works, those in the chapter called “The Far Field“.

He writes in plain language but to be honest I don’t always understand what he’s talking about. Perhaps he lived a difficult life or a self obsessive life. Either way, this collection falls flat.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Dickey called him our best American poet, and he was the teacher of who I consider our best American poet (or one of them), Jack Gilbert.
It'd be hard to find fault with Roethke, then, though I struggled a bit with the first quarter of this collection (I'm not a fine of outright rhyming sonance). The rest of his stuff is great, subdued and often weird, not to the point of strangulated cacophony but a drifting sense of unease.

[Bonnie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I need to find out what poems I read in Premier Book of Major Poets: An Anthology that made me want this book so bad, because it was so tedious and disappointing. Maybe I'm not sophisticated enough to get it, but this guy rambles about leaves almost as much as Walt Whitman. Maybe that's not my genre. I think I need more structure. Like if you're going to talk about a river, finish the thought. If you're going to talk about love, don't cut yourself off mid-way to start talking about dirt on a rock. Frustrating. That being said, here are the poems I truly did enjoy:

- For An Amorous Lady
- Vernal Sentiment
- The Waking
- His Foreboding (Favorite line: "The loneliest thing I know, is my own mind at play.")
- The Shy Man
- The Geranium
- Lines Upon Leaving A Sanitarium

[Kit · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poet, hands down. His way with words is stunning. Personal favorite poems include Reply to a Lady Editor, Elegy for Jane, My Papa’s Waltz, The Geranium and The Saginaw Song. I'm obsessed.

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 3 out of 5]

"All women loved dance in a dying light."

Oxfam gem! My writing mentor recommended this because my work reminded him of Roethke's "Memory" (in retrospect, what a grand compliment because that is one of his best pieces).

It is clear that Roethke believes in reworking the essence of the greats and paying homage, with references including Blake, WCW, Yeats, and Auden to name a few. (Also, plot twist, Roethke then influenced Sylvia Plath!) Many of his poems felt like dogged reiterations of the same idea—one can only read light, desire, leaf, death, and stone so many times. Yes, these are essentials of life, but, in a collection of this size, I expected more evolution. And then Roethke goes off and writes a string of nonsense poems that wouldn't be amiss in the oeuvre of Lewis Carroll. A bizarre choice, but fine.

He does emerge victorious on a line level (stupendous!), but his poems as a whole didn't often rivet me. I think Roethke would have been an entertaining professor though! I read he once climbed through his classroom's window and made faces at his students from outside. There is also a tender ode to a student who died young found in this collection.

You can tell that Roethke's Christian roots lingered, alongside his interest in mysticism.

"Make me, O Lord, at last, a simple thing / Time cannot overwhelm."

[J Dubyuh]

Memory:

In the slow world of dream,
We breathe in unison.
The outside dies within,
And she knows all I am.

She turns, as if to go,
Half-bird, half-animal.
The wind dies on the hill.
Love’s all. Love’s all I know.

A doe drinks by a stream,
A doe and it’s fawn.
When I follow after them,
The grass changes to stone.

[Descending Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of it isn't all that great, there are a number of poems I didn't care for and then out of nowhere Roethke with hit you with something great, a mixed bag.

[Nancy Lewis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most of these didn't make much sense, but there were a couple that I liked.

[Ansove · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is actually excellent.

[Nathaniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are a small handful of Roethke's poems that have had a great impact on me, and which I'm grateful to possess physical copies of thanks to this book. But the majority of them are....blah. Sorry, Theodore.

[The Master · Rating 5 out of 5]

I suppose the time is right to admit that I had a secret, blazing love affair with Theodore Roethke when I was a student.

He showed me bird's tongue orchids, gave dreams of death, and taught me the inexorable sadness of pencils.

Theo's been dead since 1963, and my lit profs will be of too advanced an age to be much bothered by my admission.

After all these years, his voice jars me like the shattering of a clay flower pot.

Our worst moment was when I discovered the phonetic spelling of his surname. I'd been saying it wrong for years, but he had never corrected me. The discovery and the embarrassment of it made me burn like an old house in a far field.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was familiar with only few of Theodore Roethke's poems, "The Waking," and "My Papa's Waltz." After reading his collected works, some two hundred poems, I am impressed with his body of work. I know that the late Jim Harrison, a great poet himself, thought much of Roethke. Maybe because they shared a love of the natural world.
It took me a long while to finish this collection because I wanted to savor these poems. I was also taken by the maturity in skill from reading his first collection, published in 1941, to the posthumously published poems in 1965. The long arc of his work.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of it is mind-boggling--those swampy and phlegmy poems. Then there's crap like the much-anthologized "My Papa's Waltz." I'm glad to have rediscovered him--what's good here is unlike anything else, puts me in touch with something long-forgotten.

[Gary McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, it's all about the "North American Sequence" and the last book, The Far Field. Screw "My Papa's Waltz." ;)

[Joshua Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like any great poet, Roethke gives words to experiences you forgot you ever had. Wonderful collection. Just the poem `What Can I Tell My Bones' can be mind altering.

[kimyunalesca · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my new favorite poet.The Waking poem started all this for me I'm glad I found and bought a copy.I had loads of fun reading this I really enjoyed it!

[Andrew Pitkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Roethke is a subtle, brilliant, indispensable American poet.

Wish I'd discovered him sooner - great stuff!

[violetderey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I turn to reading and re-reading Roethke when I need reminding of the less analytical life. Beautiful poetry that always relaxes the limits of mundane experience.

[chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walk boldly my sister but do not deign to give
Remain secure from pain preserve thy hate thy heart.
-- "To My Sister"

Sometimes the blood is privileged to guess
The things the eye or hand cannot possess.
-- "The Signals"

I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.
-- "Epidermal Macabre"

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?

I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it, --
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.
-- "Cuttings (later)"

Kiss me, kiss me quick, mistress of lost wisdom,
Come out of a cloud, angel with several faces,
Bring me my hat, my umbrella and rubbers,
Enshroud me with Light! O Whirling! O Terrible Love!
-- "Last Words"

Such music in a skin!
A bird sings in the bush of your bones.
-- "Give Way, Ye Gates"

I'll seek my own meekness.
What grace I have is enough.
The lost have their own pace.
The stalks ask something else.
What the grave says,
The nest denies.

In their harsh thickets
The dead thrash.
They help.
-- "Unfold! Unfold!"

The body and the soul know how to play
In that dark world where gods have lost their way.
-- "Four for Sir John Davies"

Ghost cries out to ghost --
But who's afraid of that?
I fear those shadows most
That start from my own feet.
-- "The Surly One"

The moon draws back its waters from the shore.
By the lake's edge, I see a silver swan,
And she is what I would. In this light air,
Lost opposites bend down --
Sing of that nothing of which all is made,
Or listen into silence, like a god.
-- "The Swan"

I saw a young snake glide
Out of the mottled shade
And hang, limp on a stone:
A thin mouth, and a tongue
Stayed, in the still air.

It turned; it drew away;
Its shadow bent in half;
It quickened, and was gone.

I felt my slow blood warm.
I longed to be that thing,
The pure, sensuous form.

And I may be, some time.
-- "Snake"

Who would know the dawn
When there's a dazzling dark behind the sun?
-- "The Dying Man"

The edges of the summit still appall
When we brood on the dead or the beloved;
Nor can imagination do it all
In this last place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
-- "The Dying Man"

By swoops of bird, by leaps of fish, I live.
My shadow steadies in a shifting stream;
I live in the air; the long light is my home;
I dare caress the stones, the field my friend;
A light wind rises: I become the wind.
-- "Her Becoming"

How comprehensive that felicity!...
A body with the motion of a soul.
What dream's enough to breathe in? A dark dream.
The rose exceeds, the rose exceeds us all.
Who'd think the moon could pare itself so thin?
A great flame rises from the sunless sea;
The light cries out, and I am there to hear --
-- "The Longing"

I, who came back from the depths laughing too loudly,
Become another thing;
My eyes extend beyond the farthest bloom of the waves;
I lose and find myself in the long water;
I am gathered together once more;
I embrace the world.
-- "The Long Waters"

Is the body but a motion in a shoe?
-- "The Tranced"

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance?
-- "In a Dark Time"

A dark theme keeps me here,
Though summer blazes in the vireo's eye.
Who would be half possessed
By his own nakedness?
Waking's my care --
I'll make a broken music, or I'll die.
-- "In Evening Air"

I feel the autumn fail -- all that slow fire
Denied in me, who has denied desire.
-- "The Sequel"

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I set up a playlist of myself reading some favorite poems to help me get to sleep and stay asleep. Theodore Roethke's The Waking is one of the poems, so I was hearing it regularly on and off such that it's bizarreness and collage-like construction began to intrigue my sleepy mind. His I Knew a Woman is also on that playlist and reinforced the intrigue. I knew his earlier work was not like this, was more straightforward, less impressionistic, less collage-y, less full of odd questions. I was curious how he got from one to the other and so it was time to read a complete book of his work. So I did and he still confounds me, which is why it has taken me months from closing the book to come approach this review.

It's not uncommon for poets to have different modes/voices/styles throughout the length of their careers as artists, so why does it seem strange to me when it's true of Roethke? Perhaps because they're so distinct? His early work is about his childhood and usually uses traditional forms. At the end of his second book is when he breaks the measured voice and traditional leaning with the sequence The Lost Son. As I suspected it might be, it is a pretty striking break but I don't think he hit his stride with this voice or method of composing until his book The Waking. It remained until his last book, The Far Field, which struck me as at times being rather Wordsworthian. It was essentially turning back to an earlier mode.

Before The Far Field he also wrote some children's poetry, none of which I liked--and I usually do enjoy children's poetry, so I found that discouraging.

I read this book quite slowly because I was frequently asking myself "what is he doing here," and "why does this even work--it shouldn't." I can't say I came up with any answers. But it was helpful to discover that he kept a notebook. I know nothing about this notebook except that one of his former students, the poet David Wagoner, used the notebook to compose some poems himself. So I suspect that Roethke kept a collection of questions and thoughts and pleasing lines that he then drew from when composing. It's just a guess though and I still don't know how he made them work together as he did.

I don't usually look too deeply into a poet when I'm reading their work but you don't have to look too deeply into Roethke to discover he was lauded as a great teacher of poetry. He was reputedly critical to the careers of James Wright, Carolyn Kizer, David Wagoner, and Richard Hugo. One of the questions that arose for me is why when such a confluence happens on the eastern half of the US, it's considered a movement or a school of poetry and yet we never hear of the Northwest School--or the Roethke School. If anything Wagoner and Hugo are often slotted as regional. Maybe because their poetics aren't uniform enough? Maybe because Wright, whose style most clearly bears Roethke's influence, is usually associated with Ohio. Roethke himself is orginally from Michigan but spent his professional career in Washington state. Or is the collective shrugging at this confluence of talents a form of snobbery/snubbery? I don't have the answer to that either.

And I haven't decided if Theodore Roethke is one of my favorite poets or if he's simply a poet who wrote a couple of my favorite poems. I'm keeping this book to read again because I still find him curious. And the complete poetry of James Wright (a book I'd been on the cusp of getting anyway) and of Richard Hugo (a poet I'd largely forgotten about) are now on my reading shelf. I've already dipped back into Carolyn Kizer. I'm not sure what I'll do about David Wagoner, who passed in 2021. He has also written one of my favorite poems (Lost) but not much of his other work has appealed to me.

And so ends my first full perplexing experience with Theodore Rothke's poetry.

[Henry Sturcke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is a mixed bag. I’m rating it with five stars anyway, for when Roethke was good, he was very good. I liked in particular “The Lost Son.” It has a language and themes all its own and gives the feeling it could have been written by no other poet. There are many other fine ones as well. I’m struck by how many good love poems he wrote, as incongruous as they seem in company of those in which he rages in the mire of physical life. Throughout, there is the contention between flesh and spirit and the awareness of death. Many images are recurrent: stone, snail, snake, and the basic elements, especially fire and water. He was also obsessed with birds and—son of the greenhouse—flowers.
A telling line from “What Can I Tell My Bones” seems a key to Roethke’s perceptions and obsessions: “The dead love the unborn.” Roethke is intensely aware that his particular person is part of a great network of being, connected not only to all of nature (animate and inanimate) but to all that came before or will come. His yearning for reconnection with this leads not only to the imagery of rebirth; his longing extends to a recapitulation of evolution. The self-referential “worm,” conventionally in the pen of other writers an expression of self-loathing (at times in Roethke as well), is, for him, a sign of kinship.
Roethke’s nursery poems point in the same direction, a recapturing of simplicity. For the most part, however, these songs of experience-informed innocence don’t work for me. Nevertheless, there are many poems in this book that I’ll return to again and again.