SOURCE: "Poets and Critics on Roethke," in "The Edge of What I Have": Theodore Roethke and After, Bucknell University Press, 1977, pp. 13-36.

[In the following essay, Williams provides a survey of Roethke's critical reception among contemporary poets and reviewers.]

Throughout Theodore Roethke's middle and late career and after his death in 1963, poets have enthusiastically praised his work, while major critics have generally ignored or slighted him. Not until the fifth edition of the well-known anthology, Sanders, Nelson, and Rosenthal's The Chief Modern Poets of England and America (1970), was Roethke included; and only recently in a collection of essays, Profile of Theodore Roethke (1971), the editor, William Heyen, pointed out that nine of his ten contributors were themselves poets (the single exception being Roethke's biographer, the late novelist Allan Seager), thus again reminding one that Roethke is essentially a poet's poet.

What later poets particularly admired in Roethke's work was the unusual intensity of the lyric voice, the projection of a preconscious self into the life of plants and animals, using highly original free-verse patterns that presented the speaker, the I in the poems, as unmasked—the poet himself asserting an oracular voice that tries to sound out archetypal themes, often probing the child-parent relation through a selective use of surrealistic imagery, that is, the "deep image." Carolyn Kizer quoted the poet himself in his role of teacher at the University of Washington (1947–63): "I teach a beat"; and she went on to underscore one of Roethke's characteristic rhythms—the end stopped, strong stress trimeter line, to which the poet continually returned throughout his career. Largely because of Roethke's presence in Seattle, she surmised, a significant number of talented poets gathered there.

If Roethke was revered for his mastery of the short line, he was equally revered for his mastery of the long line. His "great verbal sophistication," as Howard Nemerov describes it, manifests itself, not in the unit of the line, but in the strophe. James Wright, once a student of Roethke's, captures this twofold lyrical quality when, in his own poetry, he writes, praising his teacher: "And sweet Ted Roethke, / A canary and a bear," or elsewhere in referring to Swift's poems: "These are the songs that Roethke told of, / The curious music loved by few." It is this lyricism defining an epic theme—what Stanley Kunitz calls the poet's protean journey of transformation out of the self—that accounts for Roethke's particular appeal and influence. For Kunitz, Roethke's lyrical journey out of the self is a real achievement because he does not indulge his ego, and as a result he "was the first American bardic poet since Whitman who did not spill out in prolix and shapeless vulgarity."

Leslie Fiedler sees Roethke's work as seeking out myth and image in the privacy of dreams rather than in a decaying culture. Roethke's journey is a returning, not to a lost culture, but to the greenhouse of his youth where his father watched over and cared for a floral culture; and it is a return, as Fiedler perceptively describes it, "to all that is truly subversive in the line that comes down to us from Poe by way of symbolisme." Delmore Schwartz, who sees Roethke as original and important enough to be compared to Yeats and Valéry, notes Roethke's genuine awareness of the "abyss," the depths of the unconscious to which all romantic poets must return for self-definition and value. Because this return to the unconscious is dangerous, courting psychic disaster, achievement of self-renewal is at best precarious. Failure is always close at hand, yet self-renewal "is what we want: to be gathered together once more," says James Dickey, quoting from the end of Roethke's "The Long Waters." Roethke extends into modern times that Wordsworthian sense of being, of reunification with nature and one's self, and for this reason alone Roethke is for Dickey the greatest American poet there has ever been.

Perhaps C. W. Truesdale has best summed up Roethke's appeal by equating Roethke's second volume, The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948), to Whitman's "Song of Myself"—an extension, in fact, of Whitman's poetics, exhibiting a controlling metaphor of organic growth and a progress from darkness to light: "Most of what we call the American archetypes find themselves again in his work (in unexpected ways), and above all the sense of the land—the vast, the particular, the wasted, the utterly beautiful and the utterly exploited landscape of America, the motherland of Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, even Cooper." Truesdale does not identify the major works, as such, other than "The Lost Son" sequence of poems, but it is the theme of resurrection in that sequence that, for Truesdale, defines Roethke's appeal: "the poet is always the 'lost son' seeking a fresh birth in a new America."

In reviewing Roethke's first collection of verse, Words for the Wind (1958), John Berryman compares Roethke with Robert Lowell; the two "possess the most powerful and original talents that have emerged during the last fifteen years." If Lowell is Latinate, formal, rhetorical, massive, historical, religious, impersonal, then Roethke is "Teutonic, irregular, colloquial, delicate, botanical and psychological, irreligious, personal"—a formidable list of comparisons, indeed, but comparisons that perhaps Roethke would have agreed with, since he had remarked at one time about Lowell's excessive concern with formal structures, and about his lack of intuitive perception. Berryman also singles out the longer poems in "The Lost Son" sequence as Roethke's largest achievement, one of the "fixed objects" in American poetry.

In addition to praise, one is not surprised to find some of these poets acknowledging a direct influence. Kunitz candidly admits that Roethke had taught him a way of coping with affliction. Galway Kinnell insists that no one really had any influence on his work, "until I ran across Theodore Roethke's poems." In accounting for Ted Hughes's poetic power, W. E. Snodgrass sees Hughes doing the same thing as Roethke.

Anne Sexton remembers "writing to Sylvia [Plath] in England after The Colossus came out and saying something like '… if you're not careful, Sylvia, you will out-Roethke Roethke,' and she replied that I had guessed accurately and that he had been a strong influence on her work."

Just what these poets saw in Roethke's work that the critics found convenient to ignore raises interesting questions that I shall try to answer throughout the ensuing pages. Why, for example, should so many critics have remained cool for so long to the romantic archetypes and lyricism that attracted the poets to Roethke in the first place? Perhaps it is the lack of a well-defined terminology for the motive and effect involved in any exchange between two or more poets—as Richard Wilbur has recently suggested in an essay on the subject of poetic influences. Wilbur reminds one that poets do borrow, steal, adapt, translate, impersonate, and parody one another, and that it is the business of other poets and also of the critics to account for this behavior. Wilbur himself discusses the beneficial effects of the Yeatsian influence on Roethke in the early fifties, an influence that Roethke literally documented in "Four for Sir John Davies" and "The Dying Man," as well as the poem later added to the greenhouse sequence in The Lost Son, "Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze." In fact, the trimeter line Carolyn Kizer speaks of is a product of this Yeatsian influence. Of course, an influence can become merely derivative if it is not transformed in the younger writer's imagination, for in reading any poet the reader is always put into that position where he must distinguish between what is wholly belonging to the poet—what is stolen, to use Eliot's phrase—and what is merely borrowed. Without referring to particular poems, Wilbur sees Roethke's later poetry, after the "Yeatsian poems," showing an absorption of the older writer's influence, and hence a perfection of the Roethkean voice.

Although many of the major critics were silent about Roethke at mid-century and after, there were some critics who raised specific objections. In his study of modern English and American poets, The Shaping Spirit (1958), A. Alvarez defines the "unmannered," confessional mode of the American poet who writes from a sense of his own isolation within a classless, unstructured society. Speaking about The Lost Son in general, Alvarez argues that Roethke failed to succeed as a confessional poet. Roethke's talent "of a kind" (of a much lower caliber than that of Lowell's or Eberhart's) is delicate and direct in its treatment of the poet's "private troubles" (Alvarez refers to only one of the greenhouse poems, "Cuttings"), but because there is no sense of embarrassment, there is offered only an immediate purity and not that "overbearing, claustrophobic intensity" that Alvarez would have. In Roethke's subsequent volume, Praise to the End! (1951), Alvarez sees the poet as merely exploiting his material, using his verse "as though it were an analyst's couch." Roethke's artistic identity is a matter of nonconformity and being different: "He ends where the important writers begin, in that sense of isolation from which they create an impersonal artistic order."

M. L. Rosenthal's first critical introduction, The Modern Poets (1960), also treats Roethke as part of the confessional school of American writing. The greenhouse poems of The Lost Son volume are (contrary to Alvarez) "embarrassedly alive," yet, "as in most of Roethke's longer works, the dénouement does not live up to the poem's initial demands." Generally a defender of the "new poetry," Rosenthal is severely critical of Roethke's personal manner, "the private sensibility of a mad microcosm" that seeks unity and wholeness that, in the case of "The Lost Son," is merely wishful thinking. In his second study of poetry since World War II, The New Poets (1967), Rosenthal reiterates his position and further extends his remarks to Roethke's posthumous volume, The Far Field (1964), which he sees as "often marred by verbosity, cliché, and derivativeness." Admitting that Roethke came into his own as a poet in his group of greenhouse poems, "that his youthful experience around his father's greenhouse in Michigan provided just the vivid, squirmingly uncomfortable, and concrete focus his poetry needed to channel," that these poems enabled him to objectify for a time his "uncontrolled, riotous psyche," Rosenthal nevertheless objects to Roethke's seeming inability to absorb "so little of the concerns of his age into his nerve-ends … so little reference direct or remote to the incredible experiences of the age." In Roethke's hands, then, the confessional mode is reduced to self-recharging and self-echoing.

The charge that Roethke's poetry is outside the experiences of the age is repealed by Monroe K. Spears in his study of modern poetry, Dionysus and the City (1970). Referring generally to "The Lost Son" sequence, Spears admits that Roethke's poetry at its best has a "deep inwardness and closeness to the Unconscious," yet because the Dionysian element is so strong, the poetry refuses to deal with "the world of normal adult experience." As a result, much of the verse tends toward incoherence and "real obscurity."

It has been demonstrated how some poets revered Roethke's lyricism, his voice of the self proclaiming a drama of the new self, but certain critics have found this preoccupation with the self too narcissistic. Discussing the nature of the modern lyric, William Pritchard looks upon Roethke as a representative figure of the "somnambulistic" poet devoid of irony and changing tone of voice. Pritchard would advance the cause of a Frost, or a Lowell—despite the singular tones of a Milton, or a Blake, as Pritchard himself admits—the cause for a lyricism that gestures between lyric impulse and the "wryly satiric." These "negative" critics appear to agree on at least two points: Roethke's limited theme that makes him (embarrassed or not) merely a personal, self-conscious poet, and his lyric form or lyrical monotone. These negative criteria, however, can be turned to Roethke's account.

In his seminal essay, "The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke" (The Sewanee Review, Winter 1950), Kenneth Burke offered for the first time a challenging structural approach to The Lost Son volume. Burke recognizes at once the symbolic importance of the greenhouse for Roethke (in Roethke's words: "A womb, a heaven-on-earth"), and from the thirteen-poem greenhouse sequence (now fourteen), he singles out that poem about the greenhouse itself, "Big Wind," as being representative of Roethke's method in all of these poems—his "intensity of action" whereby the poem develops from stage to stage, with the "unwinding of the trope." It is not the close description of flowers that makes these poems succeed—although this is clearly part of Roethke's intention—but the fact that Roethke can make his flowers suggest analogues to human behavior and motives quite like the figures of animals in Aesop's fables. In exploiting the floral image, even as a conceit, as Burke sees it, Roethke could develop these analogues on different levels of meaning (root, sprout, blossom), all the while amplifying his theme by a regressive withdrawing of the self ("the most occult of early experiences"). In this greenhouse world with its "peculiar balance of the natural and the artificial," there is almost a perfect symbol for that mystery that relates the individual with the social: "In hothouse flowers, you confront, enigmatically, the representation of status. By their nature, flowers contribute grace to social magic—hence, they are insignia, infused with a spirit of social ordination." In establishing Roethke's radicalism, Burke distinguishes between Eliot's aesthetic and that of Roethke's—the latter, for example, expressing an intuition of sensibilities having a minimum of ideas and a maximum of intuitions, hence a poetry of impulse rather than motive. In this way Roethke's vocabulary is shorn of the abstract—words with -ness or -ity endings—that characterize much of Eliot's poetry. Eliot meets the modern problem of identity in terms of doctrine, while Roethke grapples with that problem in opposite terms, regressing as thoroughly as he could, "even at a considerable risk, toward a language of sheer 'intuition.'" Moreover, Roethke's images become symbolically intuitive when they interchange their meanings through repetition in varying contexts; thus fish, water, flower, or girl might form a symbolic cluster by the repetition of each of these images in related contexts. In this way the images fuse their respective meanings: "They are 'fusions' if you like them, 'confusions' if you don't, and 'diffusions' when their disjunction outweighs their conjunction."

In dealing with the longer sequences, including "The Lost Son," Burke touches on two important techniques that have come to characterize Roethke's method in all of his long poems, as shall be seen later. The first is Roethke's shifting voice, extending the I of the speaker into a "cosmically communicating 'voice.'" The second is the way the imagery brings into tension the concrete and the abstract by almost always invoking the notion of "edge" (also suggested by the disjunctive qualities of the truncated, and endstopped lines): "the constant reverberations about the edges of the images give the excitement of being on the edge of Revelation (or suggest a state of vigil, the hope of getting the girl, of getting a medal, of seeing God). There is the pious awaiting of the good message—and there is response to "the spoor that spurs." Burke reprinted his essay in his collection, Language as Symbolic Action (1966), without changing it, for, as he was to say in a note appended there, "I cannot better contrive to suggest the rare, enticing danger of Roethke's verse as I felt it then, and still do."

Nothing of critical importance appeared in the decade following Burke's essay. Perhaps the publication of one notable volume of poetry (The Lost Son) coming seven years after Roethke's first volume, Open House (1941), was not enough of a production to attract serious attention. Also, the radicalism that Burke proclaimed may well have cautioned critics, for Roethke was to become more experimental (as the poems juxtaposed to Burke's essay were to show) in his next volume, Praise to the End!, which effectively extended "The Lost Son" sequence. Moreover, consistency was not Roethke's habit: he introduced a neo-Yeatsian mode in The Waking (1953) and extended it further into Words for the Wind (1958), all the while carrying over poems from one volume to the next. But in the sixties, especially after Roethke's death and his posthumously published The Far Field (1964), a number of important critics began to give this poet their attention. Arnold Stein edited a collection of essays in Theodore Roethke: Essays on the Poetry (1965), the first collection that indicates Roethke's new-found acceptance by the critical establishment. Most of the essays tend to support Roethke's growth as a poet, but because of the breakthrough made by The Lost Son and the radical experiments of the related poems in the Praise to the End! sequence, two questions naturally suggest themselves: do these two volumes—and specifically the former—constitute Roethke's achievement? Is there no growth and development in the later poetry?

Stephen Spender, W. D. Snodgrass, John Wain, and Louis Martz argue for a decline in poetic strength. Spender, for example, acknowledges Roethke's nonegotistic search of the I in "The Lost Son" sequence from these two volumes—hence the title of his essay, "The Objective Ego"—yet in the later poetry Roethke exhibits "the Yeatsian grand manner, he becomes the egotist who burdens the reader with his problems." A perpetual beginner, Roethke could not extend his childlike visions of organic nature into the world of society as everyone must come to know it; "he was not a free enough intellect to dominate the Yeatsian mode." Snodgrass's particularly incisive essay, "'That Anguish of Concreteness,'" similarly sees a failing in the later Yeatsian poems; but if Roethke, "who had invented the most raw and original voice of all our period," had misused the formal and elegant voice of Yeats, he had not done so with Eliot's voice (a less confining influence), which is behind the long sequence, "Meditations of an Old Woman," for here the Roethkean voice clearly emerges. In the later poems from The Far Field, the mystical and religious rationale and the borrowed cadences become too pervasive for Snodgrass, as does Roethke's penchant for rejecting form as he creates it in his seeking a unity with all objects. Eliot's ideas and Yeats's cadences have become models of form, "have rushed in to fill the vacuum of the father-model." Rejection of form, then, becomes itself a form, a convention, and the language then becomes weakened through slackness and "expectability." John Wain, in his essay, "The Monocle of My Sea-Faced Uncle," similarly praises "Meditations of an Old Woman," more for its originality and evocation of a genuinely feminine personality. Roethke is the only poet of the century who successfully refuses compromise between inner and outer reality by insisting on his intensity of vision, and to write about those things "that the mind apprehends only through the intuitions of the body." For these reasons Praise to the End! occupies a central place in the Roethkean canon. Louis Martz, on the other hand, sees Roethke's originality in terms of mind rather than bodily intuition. Applying Wallace Stevens's lines, "The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice," to Roethke's manner, Martz reveals a meditative mode displaying a speaker/actor who "seeks himself in himself in order to discover or to construct a firm position from which he can include the universe." Roethke's meditative manner develops out of the greenhouse poems—"one of the permanent achievements of modern poetry"—and reaches its zenith in the longer sequences making up the last section of The Lost Son, "The Greenhouse Eden" (Martz's title), to which Roethke would return in his later poetry, but never surpass.

The later poetry receives more sympathetic treatment from Ralph J. Mills, Jr., Frederick J. Hoffman, William Meredith, Denis Donoghue, and Roy Harvey Pearce. Mills's essay, "In the Way of Becoming: Roethke's Last Poems," treats the Roethkean journey as a quest for mystical illumination, a quest that alternates between contrary states within the "reflective consciousness" of the speaker—between ecstasy and despair—as in "Meditations of an Old Woman" and "North American Sequence." However, it is not until "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical," constituting the last section of The Far Field, that Roethke reaches his peak in the process aimed toward "a union with or experience of the Divine." Unlike the freer, Whitmanesque rhythms with their breath-controlled strophes in "North American Sequence," the lyricism in "Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical" is taut and economic, "capable of containing and concentrating immense pressures of feeling," (the two sequences exemplifying Roethke's opposing rhythmic forms). What Snodgrass sees as a weakness in this last volume, Roethke's desire to escape all form and shape, is precisely what Mills commends as "Roethke's mystical perceptions by striking inward steadily with little recourse to external affairs … approximating the instant of naked revelation."

Donoghue, Meredith, and Pearce approach the poetry as an ordering of chaos, both inner and outer, private and public. Donoghue's perceptive essay, "Roethke's Broken Music," follows the Burkean example in tracing Roethke's "intuition of sensibilities" to define that ordering process. If the early poems held out the common romantic idea of the opposing self, the middle and late poems develop the sense of losing one's self at the edge of the abyss, and "the abyss is partly the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, partly a ditch of his [Roethke's] own contriving, partly the fate of being human in a hard time, partly the poet's weather." This is the way to innocence; the poems are intuitive directions, akin to spiritual exercises, "all the better if they are caustic, purgative, penitential. The exercises are never finished, because this is the way things are, but once they are well begun the soul can proceed; the energy released is the rage for a sustaining order." Donoghue stresses Roethke's universal appeal, insisting that he is never merely a regional or American poet. He gives two valid arguments: first, Roethke's eclectic influences (Eliot, Hopkins, Joyce, Whitman, Stevens, Yeats) preclude such labeling, and, second, Roethke's response to the parental figures (and the wife or lover in the love poems) is so vivid it engrosses all other responses that would better define a regional or local poet. In the poet's search for value and meaning there is an assumption on Roethke's part that this search is only interesting insofar as it is representative, and of no interest when it ceases to be. "Roethke set himself to work toward lucidity and order without turning himself into a case study entitled, 'The Still Complex Fate of Being an American'…. But," Donoghue adds, avoiding a seeming contradiction, "Roethke's way of being an American is an eminently respectable way, and part of his achievement is that he makes it available to others." It is just this availability, the nature of Roe dike's influence, that is studied in the last chapter of this text.

In Meredith's essay, "A Steady Storm of Correspondences: Theodore Roethke's Long Journey Out of the Self," the assertion is again encountered that the Praise to the End! volume is central, "an anatomy of Roethke's imagery and sensibility" in which he explores the self without egotism. Flirting with "the slow rhythm of chaos," Roethke makes knowledge felt by means of syntax and rhythm; human speech becomes instinctive, "primarily involuntary, an animal cry." Pearce, on the other hand, is concerned with what he calls "the power of sympathy" in the later poetry. Roethke "could not understand the compulsive twentieth-century quest for identity via the route of alienation"; yet there is alienation in the poetry, but it is often associated with violence and only by means of sympathy is that violence transformed into power, thus, "alienation into identification." The argument of Roethke's "North American Sequence" is "to unify and make all of a piece, the world which has invaded the poet, so as to allow him to invade it." In this way the poet comes "to comprehend the full range of the other, that chain of being which moves from the minimal to God." Finally, there is Hoffman's incisive essay, "Theodore Roethke: The Poetic Shape of Death," stressing Roethke's dual language, the metaphysical and the natural. It is Roethke's particular success—unparalleled in modern American poetry—to have kept the two so well balanced, so reciprocal. Similar to Louis Martz, Hoffman regards Roethke's work as a poetry of the mind. The mind entering itself is Roethke's "steady concern," and to effect this metaphysical extension of himself he had to go beyond the greenhouse and the "papa principle" in The Lost Son, even though a sense of return was always imminent. The Roethkean persona looks into death's possibilities, he sees dying as "continual becoming," a knowledge "of growth as a move toward mortality," which finds its best expression in "Meditations of an Old Woman." In The Far Field Roethke develops metaphors of transcendence, that is, the will to transcend the particularity of the temporal process in order to define the self, and it is in the late poem, "In a Dark Time," that Roethke resolves "the mazes caused by life and the problems created by the expectation of death."

As excellent as many of these essays are, they are inevitably concerned with only the general qualities of Roethke's poetry. Within the compass of a brief essay, one can offer little structural criticism of specific poems, although what is provided is a needed emphasis on the Roethkean theme—the journey out of the self.

Aside from Burke's criticism of "The Lost Son," the earliest work done on a specific poem is Hugh Staples's essay, "The Rose in the Sea-Wind: A Reading of Theodore Roethke's 'North American Sequence'" (American Literature, May 1964). Stapes traces the sequence's structural pattern, describing the first poem of the sequence as an overture introducing the thematic imagery that will operate as leitmotifs throughout the sequence. The middle four poems alternate between sets of opposing images, earth and water, for example, or light (fire) and darkness; thus "Meditation at Oyster River" is dominated by water imagery, "Journey to the Interior" by earth imagery, the cycle repeating itself with the next two poems, "The Long Waters" and "The Far Field." A final version is then offered in the last poem, "The Rose," which presents the rose as the symbol of form, and here the sequence reconciles and resolves all the thematic images of the previous poems, gathering them together as a final achievement of unity.

Staples's method is both explicative and critical, and it may be that together with Burke he inspired further explication, the most notable example being the only book-length study so far, Karl Malkoff's Theodore Roethke: An Introduction to the Poetry (1966). Malkoff's thoughtful explication of the entire range of Roethke's poetry falls short of any critical assessment of the poet's style and structure, but it does serve a most useful purpose in explicating key themes from a psychoanalytical point of view. The longer poems from the last of The Lost Son, for example, show Roethke's "adept manipulation of a subterranean, Freudian universe," and in so doing are original for contemporary poetry at that time. In viewing the poetry from psychological perspectives, Malkoff stresses the poet's personal sense of guilt—sexual in "The Lost Son," and in the form of a personal mysticism trying to take over in "Meditations of an Old Woman" and "North American Sequence." In assuming that guilt operates the controlling theme, Malkoff is forced to account for what appears to be Roethke's ambivalence (between the personal and the impersonal) in conceptualizing terms of myth and legend, and by using Freud and Jung, or other writers of consequence. As a result, Malkoff sometimes belies an impatience with Roethke's poetic strategies, as in the case of "Four for Sir John Davies": "The victory over the powers of darkness and nonbeing … is at best tentative; and this sets the pattern for the bulk of Roethke's remaining poetry, which is characterized by a tormenting vacillation between hope and despair rather than any consistent point of view."

Extending Staples's structural approach and enlarging upon Malkoff's basic explications, a few good studies of individual poems have appeared over the past several years. William Heyen in his essay, "Theodore Roethke's Minimals" (Minnesota Review, 1968), shows how Roethke's random selection of minimals (worms, mice, dogs, children, crows, and the like) is not meant to offer a development or hierarchy, as in a great chain of being, but rather is made to support the poet's varying moods. Most of the images represent stages of becoming and being, as in "Meditations of an Old Woman" where the woman's alternate moods of elation and despair are reflected in the way she interprets the bird and its song during the entire sequence. Heyen's criticism favors a mystical approach to the poetry, and a year later one finds him writing toward that end in a second essay, "The Divine Abyss: Theodore Roethke's Mysticism" (Texas Studies in Language and Literature, Winter 1969). Heyen concentrates on "The Abyss" from The Far Field in order to develop Malkoff's assertion that Roethke was quite familiar with Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism. That the poem's five-part structure corresponds to Underhill's outline of five phases of mysticism (awakening of self; purification of self; illumination; the dark night of the soul; union) is somewhat weakened by Heyen's admission that the fourth phase, the dark night of the soul, finds little correspondence in the poem. Yet the poem is the "prototypical" mystical poem, and the mystical journey it suggests is the very essence of many of Roethke's later poems in Words for the Wind and The Far Field.

Another essay of a more explicatory mode than Heyen's is James McMichael's "The Poetry of Theodore Roethke" (The Southern Review, Winter 1969). McMichael again emphasizes the Roethkean predicament—the journey out of the self, and particularly its relationship to the meaning of God for Roethke, the desire to find one's God: "I have emphasized," says McMichael, "that the sine qua non of Roethke's journey out of the self is his commitment to the mindless part of God's creation." Woman and animals are the mediators of this "mindless part" because they are closer to the "soil." In "North American Sequence," however, woman is precluded from the hierarchy of mediators of this "his most complete definition" of the journey out of the self. McMichael follows Staples's treatment of leitmotifs in the sequence as a hierarchy of elements within an earth-air-water framework. The final poem of the sequence is an ambitious attempt to define the paradoxical relationship between self and other and achieve as much resolution as possible. The rose, as symbol, is outside the hierarchy of mediators that has been at work in the preceding five poems; yet the value of the rose is somehow related to the transiency of this hierarchy, and the fact that this commitment might sink to nothingness leaves the poet (and the reader) with an acute sense of man's central dilemma.

Reworking Burke's ideas about Roethke's "intuition of sensibilities," Jerome Mazzaro develops a linguistic/psychological metaphor to explicate a sampling of the poetry in his essay, "Theodore Roethke and the Failures of Language" (Modern Poetry Studies, July 1970). Again, Mazzaro underscores the success of Roethke's intuitively directed language because it is symbolically informed. But something is lost in the process, and that is language's failure to communicate cognitively when it is intended to function symbolically. Roethke exemplifies that peculiar energy that depth psychologists claim an American culture creates, an energy "emanating from the tensions produced by the distance between the high level of her conscious culture and an unmeditated unconscious primitive landscape." Mazzaro's account for the unintelligibility of some of the poetry, particularly in Praise to the End!, amounts to an apology for the poet: "for complete interaction, his [the reader's] sensitivity to symbolic language must equal the poet's."

As if to exemplify Mazzaro's pronouncement about psychic parity between reader and poet, John Vernon offers his explication of "The Lost Son" sequence in Praise to the End! in his essay, "Theodore Roethke's Praise to the End! Poems" (The Iowa Review, Fall 1971). In attempting to account for the entire "Lost Son" sequence (not to be confused with the greenhouse sequence of an equal number of poems), Vernon discusses the first few poems, particularly the opening poem, "Where Knock is Open Wide," giving very little attention to the central poem, "The Lost Son" (until Vernon's essay very little, if nothing, of critical significance had ever been done with the "nonsense poems" making up part of this sequence). Vernon sees the dynamism of the child's world depicted in these poems; it is a synaesthetic world in which the imagery is predominantly sexual and parental. Father, mother, and self define a trinitarian identity that is always fluid because it is always holding in tension notions of separateness and mergence, of time and timelessness, of presence and absence.

In writing about the rise of a sacramental visionary mode in literature replacing the "supernaturalist figuralism" of the past, Nathan A. Scott, Jr., in his recent book, The Wild Prayer of Longing: Poetry and the Sacred (1971), devotes a chapter to Roethke as the exemplary poet of the sacred. Scott refers to Roethke's Blakean remark that everything that lives is holy, and he sees Roethke's sacramental verse as peculiarly American, promoting a sense of awe or wonder in the tradition of Whitman, Twain, Melville, or Thoreau. Roethke's praise of the small, calling upon snails, weeds, birds, and the like, keeps him away from the mystical, the supernatural, the "Supreme Fictions," even "God." Despite the fact that Roethke's sacramental vision is primarily limited to the non-human world, he deserves to be included "among the major poets using the English language in this century" because he knew "the very essence of the sacramental principle—namely, that nothing may be a sacrament unless everything is."

Brendan Galvin's "Theodore Roethke's Proverbs" (Concerning Poetry, Spring 1972) has given some needed attention to the proverbial, axiomatic quality of Roethke's poetry. A poem is seen as an aggregate of lines, of proverbs, separately recorded at various times in the notebooks, and it is the proverb that, for Roethke, was a way of ordering experience, "strategies" to cope with the problem of identity and to "induce his courageous plunges into the mire of the preconscious, and his subsequent returns."

What can be concluded from this criticism? Perhaps only two or three agreed-upon assertions at most—namely, that Roethke's controlling theme is the journey out of the self, that his lyric mode draws upon those of Yeats and Whitman, and that "The Lost Son" and the related poems forming "The Lost Son" sequence are central to his poetry. The rest is controversy—his mysticism, his symbolism, his range, his objectivism, his influence. Why this controversy persists (a healthy sign in itself) may be due to the absence of any thorough treatment of the poetry itself, that is, a critical assessment of more than one poem or sequence that would help establish the Roethkean mode of identity without reducing the poems to Freudian puzzles as Malkoff does. There is, of course, Burke's incisive but brief treatment of "The Lost Son," but nothing more of any consequence, except perhaps Staples's analysis of a decade ago of that other longer sequence of poems, "North American Sequence." Burke's analysis of "The Lost Son" sequence is directed to the greenhouse poems, "The Lost Son" itself receiving only selected criticism and not an extensive analysis of the entire poem. Staples's analysis of the later sequence is not only good, but also thorough and, therefore, difficult to improve upon; yet there still remains the job of tying this last sequence into the earlier ones, a job that Staples could not have contemplated, focusing almost exclusively, as he did, on the single sequence itself. Allan Seager reports that the long poems making up "North American Sequence" came easily "with an unwonted confidence," that Roethke "knew what he wanted to say and he was sure of his means." If this is true, accepting the centrality of "The Lost Son," the longest poem in the Praise to The End! sequence, then surely the one is an outgrowth of the other. There is, however, that other long sequence, "Meditations of an Old Woman," that comes between the two in time and that is quite similar in technique to the later sequence. There are, then, three long poems (the shorter of the three, "The Lost Son," is some seventy-five lines longer than the nearest contenders for length, the Yeatsian poems) that readily offer themselves for critical assessment as a group.

There are other reasons for treating these long poems as major pieces defining the Roethkean mode; for one, they exemplify in their own way that trinitarian sense of identity that John Vernon observed in the Praise to the End! sequence—the death of the father theme structuring the first poem, perhaps that of the mother the second (since Kunitz believes it was written immediately after the death of the poet's mother), and then the third poem finally concentrating on the mature self. Second, Roethke's greenhouse world, initially explored in the fourteen-poem sequence that makes up section one of The Lost Son, is never absent from these long poems; in fact, the greenhouse image is significant in each poem, making the group itself a unit for that reason alone. Third, each of these poems is somehow concerned with the urban world, the city, outside the "natural" world. In an essay entitled, "On 'Identity,'" Roethke describes his principal concerns as follows: "(1) The multiplicity, the chaos of modern life; (2) the way, the means of establishing a personal identity, a self in the face of that chaos; (3) the nature of creation, that faculty of producing order out of disorder in the arts, particularly in poetry; and (4) the nature of God Himself." He goes on to refer to his own poem, "Dolor," as a footnote to the inanimate sterility of the institution; "the 'order,'" says Roethke, "the trivia of the institution is, in human terms, a disorder, and as such, must be resisted." Resistance is precisely the method these long poems use. It might be said that they resist "false" trivia (institution trivia) with what Roethke would call "true" trivia (the trivia of "natural shapes"). It is the natural shapes running through these poems that contribute to their metric and thematic unity, but it is important to note the presence of an opposing "unnatural" imagery—in other words, intrusions from the city that become more pronounced, developing chronologically through these poems. The "kingdom of bang and blab," the disjunctive and sacred world of moss, mole, and stone depicted in "The Lost Son," can become profane and deadly as, "A kingdom of stinks and sighs, / Fetor of cockroaches, dead fish, petroleum" in the later poem, "North American Sequence." Thus, there is money creeping into the first of these poems; there are "the self-involved" and "those who submerge themselves deliberately in trivia," on the borders of the speaker's mind in the second poem; and there is the waste and decadence "at the edge of the raw cities" in the background of the third poem.

It is not usual to stress the social aspect of Roethke's poetry; indeed his ostensible neglect of the social theme has caused critics to assume that his range is limited, even as Robert Lowell seemed to do in a rather glib remark for The Paris Review (1961): "The things he knows about I feel I know nothing about, flowers and so on"—although Lowell drops glibness for reverence in his poem, "For Theodore Roethke." Roethke's apparent dearth of societal referents in his poetry, however, is really no reason to assume a lack of concern for "the incredible experiences of the age"; on the contrary, his concern can be said to condition and inspire the poetry.

Finally, Roethke's poetry has a tragic dimension so far ignored by all who have written about him. Burke alludes to it when he describes Roethke's verse as having that "rare, enticing danger" about it; and Donoghue, as well, when he speaks about the loss of self as "partly the fate of being human in a hard time," that Roethke's poems, in the middle and late period, are spiritual exercises, a way toward innocence, "never finished" in their "rage for a sustaining order." I am reminded of Yeats's remarks, for he saw the tragic dimension as a controlling form in all artistic expression: "Tragic art, passionate art, the drowner of dykes, the con-founder of understanding, moves us to reverie, by alluring us almost to the intensity of trance," and it is this trancelike condition that Roethke leads one to and away from in these major pieces, "for the nobleness of the arts"—to continue with Yeats's words—"is in the mingling of contraries, the extremity of sorrow, the extremity of joy, perfection of personality, the perfection of its surrender, overflowing turbulent energy, and marmorean stillness." Above all, it is this perfection of personality and the perfection of its surrender that Roethke accomplishes in these poems.

Joyce Carol Oates has admirably restated the problem of tragedy in modern times, and I have accepted her assumptions about the nature of tragedy—namely, that the art of tragedy grows out of a break between self and community; that at its base is fear; that although actual human life may in large part be valueless ("the multiplicity, the chaos of modern life"), tragedy asserts itself as a valuable and unique human passion, "risking loss of self in an attempt to realize self; that if the death of God means the death of tragedy, "then a redefinition of God in terms of the furthest reaches of man's hallucinations can provide us with a new basis for tragedy." Because Roethke's three longest poems are themselves an expression, among other things, of this search for God ("… the nature of God Himself)—a redefinition of God really—they share in the search, as well, for a tragic form.

It is the tragic form inherent in these three poems that perhaps in some way defines Roethke's appeal to later poets. What Staples calls "a dimension curiously suggestive of the epic," in referring to "North American Sequence," might be Roethke's assertion of a tragic form in addition to the appeal of his deep or intuitive imagery and his verbal rhythms, especially in an age of tragic failure, an age more of pathos and nihilism. Certainly, the controversy over the essence of tragedy is healthfully active today, and that Roethke should address this controversy through his art is a testament to his appeal.

In the following three chapters I shall take up, respectively, each of these three long poems in terms of the ideas discussed so far, and in the final two chapters the question of Roethke's influence in terms of the themes and lyrical qualities of the poetry discussed as well as in the poetry of some major contemporary poets. For this purpose I have chosen James Wright and Robert Bly as representative together of one facet of the Roethkean mode of experience; James Dickey by himself representing another vision of Roethke; and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes representing yet another.

It would not be wrong to suppose that many contemporary poets were reacting against the studied ironies and tensions in much of the poetry of Eliot, Stevens, and Auden—perhaps Frost and some of Lowell (and one thinks, too, of Tate and Ransom)—that these poets took a second look at Roethke's romantic stamp that bore the impressions of Wordsworth, Whitman, and Yeats. What they found—the profundity of the lyric forms in the greenhouse poems and the remarkable sequences that followed—proved to have enormous appeal for them; here again was a new voice.