Roethke, Theodore (Vol. 3) - Roethke, Theodore 1908–1963
Roethke, Theodore 1908–1963
Roethke was a major American poet. His life and work are the subjects of Allan Seager's fine biography, The Glass House.
Theodore Roethke's poems began under glass (his greenhouse poems give you the live feel of a special world) and moved underground, underwater, out into the growing universe of roots and slugs, of all the "lewd, tiny, careless lives that scuttled under stones." One is struck by what the world of his poems is full of or entirely lacking in; plants and animals, soil and weather, sex, ontogeny, and the unconscious swarm over the reader, but he looks in vain for hydrogen bombs, world wars, Christianity, money, ordinary social observations, his everyday moral doubts. Many poets are sometimes childish; Roethke, uniquely, is sometimes babyish, though he is a powerful Donatello baby who has love affairs, and whose marshlike unconscious is continually celebrating its marriage with the whole wet dark...
[The entire page is 2830 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
