Theodore Roethke by Jay Parini Read Free Book Online

was very sensitive to this intense criticism, which often found echoes of other poets in his work. This letter of 30 October 1935 seems to have upset him:
    â€œMy secrets cry aloud” (“Open House”) is all of a piece, and a good piece, too. The change in the next-to-the-last line is for the better. I think, however, that in your second stanza you’ve caught an echo from one of the poems in my last poetry group. I don’t mind in the least—but since you or some reviewer may—I’ll take the chance now of offending you. Don’t bother discussing this business, unless you feel I’m mistaken. 16
    There is no mistake on Kunitz’s part, for “Open House” resembles his “The Guilty Man,” in which he writes: “I stand within myself, myself my shield.” Roethke followed with: “I’m naked to the bone, / With nakedness my shield.” The theme of both is much the same: the need for openness, for relinquishing defense mechanisms that make it difficult to be true to oneself; but the linguistic parallels are more striking. Roethke always picked up rhythms, rhetorical gestures, and tropes from the poets he read and liked; for him, “writing poetry was like making love: it was an activity requiring a partner. All of his poems are literary love children, the issue of a union between Roethke’s own vision and the work of other poets whom he admired.” 17 This critic overstates the case, but not by much. Roethke, of course, would have denied all this vehemently. He wanted to be his own man, and he wrote to Kunitz full of regret that he had caught this echo from his friend. In a letter written in November 1935 Kunitz reassured him; here he is at his very best as mentor, full of benevolence and graceful wit:
    Don’t be a damned fool. The poem is your own . Nobody else wrote it or could have written it. Furthermore, it’s a good poem—the best one I’ve read in months, I think. I do want you to publish it and to forget about this nonsensical “fake business.” Now I curse myself for having mentioned the matter at all. I did it, believe me, in no accusing spirit and wholly without malice, as one might dissect a moth to find, among its pulp and sap, the buried engine of its tropic life.
    As for the passage in question, I believe I got the idea and some of the phraseology from a paragraph in Thoreau. Rilke expressed the same sentiment, variously, at least a dozen times. I could not, therefore, lay claim to either the substance or the expression. All of us take what we can from the mother speech, who is a bitch.
    You persecute yourself too much. The poet’s only fidelity is to the poem. One must know what one is doing, but one must not use that knowledge against oneself! That is the death of the will. 18
    Such a letter can only have bolstered the younger man’s confidence; he certainly kept the poem. But the problem of “influence” obsessed him throughout his life, especially since critics liked to point out his affinity with Yeats. Once in December 1937, he asked Kunitz to arbitrate on a poem, possibly “The Summons,” which seemed to fall under the Yeatsean shadow to an inordinate degree:
    Curse me if you will, Stanley, but here is one more poem. I won’t send or show you another until I see you, I promise. I’ve been making a desperate effort to turn away from negation and “hatred” and this is the result. The shadow of Yeats is on the page, but is it too heavy? In other words, is it my poem or a series of echoes? I believe it mine for I had to fight through much to get even this on the page. God knows what I say isn’t new, but is it worth saying in this way? I mean with this many abstractions?
    Oh hell, never mind all the questions. What’s troubling me is the “influence” business. It’s so easy to say: “Yeats: (1) three foot alternate rhymes (2)