Theodore Roethke by Jay Parini Read Free Book Online Page A

enumerations.”
    Be patient with my frantic questioning. ( SL , pp. 56–57)
    With help from Kunitz, Roethke learned that at all costs the poet must remain faithful to the poem, aware of himself as only an element, albeit the crucial one, in the creative process; he realized that a poet must be conscious of the tradition he writes from and appreciate the conventions he shares with his fellow-speakers—what Kunitz calls “the mother speech.”
    Although Roethke would turn increasingly to Kenneth Burke and others for advice in the forties, Stanley Kunitz remained an irreplaceable friend. Their relationship stands as one of the more fruitful “literary friendships” in modern poetry. It is a testimonial to Kunitz, Humphries, and Bogan that their common apprentice should have become the most significant poet of his generation. Without them, he may never have reached the level of technical accomplishment so evident in Open House . He may never have felt so free to experiment with the breaking of forms in The Lost Son and later volumes had he not first mastered them. The example of Roethke as poet-apprentice should speak to a new generation of writers who wonder how a poet like Roethke accomplished, even in free verse styles, the sense of achieved form. Each of his lines opens out like a leaf, as if inheriting the one possible shape it could have.
    We should thank his mentors for the counsel they made available when he was a talented beginner with much to learn before he could write anything like great poetry. Roethke went to these older poets as young Renaissance painters had gone to the studios of older masters; like them, he in time was able to fashion an unmistakable style of his own. In so doing, he went beyond anything Humphries, Bogan, or Kunitz might have guessed.

CHAPTER FOUR IN LANGUAGE STRICT AND PURE
    I burned my life, that I might find
    A passion wholly of the mind ,
    Thought divorced from mind and bone ,
    Ecstasy come to breath alone .
    I broke my life, to seek relief
    From the flawed light of low and grief .
    Louise Bogan, “The Alchemist”
    Roethke came to his expressive poetics rather indirectly. As has been suggested, one could hardly avoid Romantic ideas anyway; they were in the air. Yet the reaction to Romanticism had set in with T. E. Hulme, Pound, and Eliot. Auden appeared in 1930 with a new brand of anti-Romantic sentiment that deeply affected Americans like Bogan and Kunitz. The tightly structured, witty, “neo-Metaphysical” lyric came into fashion, and Roethke adopted this mode. Nevertheless, though less well realized, the themes of his early poems are much the same as those of his later work. The main themes—the need to establish a firm sense of self and the discovery of a correspondence between internal and external realities—dominate Open House . The book fails on many counts, and only a few of the lyrics suggest that Roethke was a potentially important poet. Open House would be of little interest today if Roethke had not later gone beyond the slick, cautious writing that characterizes this early work.
    The book has all the usual faults of first efforts. It is self-consciously clever, derivative, and unevenly textured in spite of at least ten years of sustained attention that went into its making. Roethke had simply gone downthe wrong path, relying too heavily on his masters and ignoring or repressing the genuine impulses of originality that would occasionally surface, especially in the poems of the late thirties. The first poem in Open House is the title poem, which has become a minor anthology piece. The tone of the first stanza is assertive, a bit strident, but it stays in the mind:
    My secrets cry aloud,
    I have no need for tongue.
    My heart keeps open house,
    My doors are widely swung.
    An epic of the eyes
    My love, with no disguise.
    ( CP , p. 3)
    The poet promises a great deal here, and the heavily end-stopped lines draw attention to the