Roethke, Theodore (Vol. 1) - Roethke, Theodore 1908–1963
Roethke, Theodore 1908–1963
Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, Roethke is the author of Words for the Wind and The Far Field.
Roethke seems to me the finest poet now [1961] writing in English. I [say] this with a certain fierceness, knowing that I have to put him up against Eliot, Pound, Graves, and a good many others of high rank. I do it also cheerfully, however, for stating his own idiosyncratic and perhaps indefensible views is part of a reviewer's business. I think Roethke is the finest, not so much because of his beautifully personal sense of form (approved even by Yvor Winters, our most insistent watchdog in these matters), but because of the way he sees and feels the aspects of life which are compelling to him. The powerful, almost somnambulistic statements of his observations and accountings come to us as from the bottom of the "deep well of unconscious cerebration" itself, from a Delphic trance where everything one says...
[The entire page is 2002 words long]
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