Daring Greatness

...This liberation from the agonizing need to be new sets his talent free to follow its own way, to develop, like the plants his father grew in the nursery which provides images for so much of his work, in an abundance controlled and enriched by cultivation: The blossoms extending Out into the sweet air, The whole flower extending outward, Stretching and reaching...

...a wardrobe of personas, a gallery of self-portraits...

...Roethke makes no bones about the poets who influenced him...

...Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Author, "The Paradox of Oscar Wilde" Theodore Roethke's Collected Poems is, like the man himself, an event in literature...

...In the moment of time when the small drop forms, but does not fall, I have known the heart of the sun, In the dark and light of a dry place, In a flicker of fire brisked by a dusty wind...

...he is not afraid to appear traditional, since, for the most part, familiar forms and rhythms suit his voice...

...Roethke in fact builds, taking shapes from without and substance from within, the kind of structure that is proper to his insights...

...The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessing, And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep...

...within the poems the best part of the man is contained...

...Yet what he establishes with these poets is not the relationship of pupil to master, but the dialogue of brothers who borrow each others' clothes...

...I rehearse myself for this: The stand at the stretch in the face of death, Delighting in surface change, the glitter of light on waves, And I roam elsewhere, my body thinking, Turning toward the other side of light, In a tower of wind, a tree idling in air, Beyond my own echo, Neither forward nor backward, Unperplexed, in a place leading nowhere...

...And it is a life's work which shows, parallel with a chaotic, unhappy outer existence, the ease that had grown within Roethke's creating self with the mastery of his art...

...significantly, they have never coalesced into anything that might be called a Roethke school, but have followed their own idiosyncratic bents...

...I cannot remember when I last dared to use the word "greatness" for a new book...

...In his ordinary and academic life Roethke provided the material for a thousand personal anecdotes, and no doubt when the memoirs of those who knew him are written these will emerge, to confuse his readers, and to pose many curious problems in reconciling the man and his work...

...A shambling, tortured man, shy and rambunctious at the same time, he often reminded one of the bears which played such a part in his poems, and particularly of the Biddly Bear who "went on fishing his way, his way...

...And yet he comes to the destination of tranquil and-as events made it seem-prophetic acceptance contained in the conclusion to "Journey to the Interior...

...For Roethkewho declared: We think by feeling...

...there is no question of death having snuffed out an unfulfilled talent, though one laments the fact that Roethke was not able to continue for another decade to write at the height of form he had reached in some of the great meditative poems which appeared in his posthumous volume, The Far Field (1964...

...to the later, open poems where, breaking that round of defensive immaturity, having found an inner balancing point with which his outer actions never synchronized, the poet can face the dark side of existence (The way blocked at last by a fallen fir-tree,/The thickets darkening,/The ravines ugly...

...and in every class some of the most intense, the most protean and the most superbly crafted writing of a generation...

...Helicon is where he finds it...

...An astonishing number of his students became good poets...

...As a blind man, lifting a curtain, knows it is morning, I know this change: On one side of silence there is no smile...

...What is there to know...

...There are, indeed, more riches in this volume than a mere review can begin to uncover...

...Those who followed Roethke's writings from the late 1940s to his death at the age of 55 in 1963, became gradually aware of the sureness with which he was moving into position as one of the major poets of the postwar era...

...Roethke liberated something within them, perhaps made some discoveries easier, but he never tried to shape them...

...It is a sufficient life's work...

...Poems of love, poems about animals and the small things of the world, nonsense poems written out of the heart of childhood and crazy poems written out of the flickering light of old age...

...The process of liberation can be seen in the change from the very first poems, which often have a rather carousel-like quality, turning on tight axes to expected conclusions that close the circle with epigrammatic neatness (Here distance is familiar as a friend./The feud we keep with space comes to an end...

...It is this strange sureness that most marks Roethke's poetry when one reads it in collection, as a life's work...

...But they should rest content...

...The forms of some of his early poems are deliberately Blakeian, deliberately Dickinsonian, and even at later stages he draws attention to his Yeatsian cadences, his Donneish debts...

...But when I breathe with the birds...

...I have heard, in a drip of leaves, A slight song, After the midnight cries...

...I learn by going where I have to go.-was a writer of exceptional self-containment...

...I use it now...

...He was also-and this has a bearing on his achievement-a teacher of poetry at the University of Washington, and one of the few practitioners of that curious half-discipline called "Creative Writing" who appears to have gained, by methods which neither he nor his students could quite define, genuine results in setting others on their proper ways...

...There is no tramping up and down symbolic mountains, Black or Parnassian, in the evolution of his work...

...This, surely, is the mark not only of a good and inspiring teacher, but also of a teacher who-at least in his chosen craft-was secure enough not to feel the need for disciples or imitators...

...And if he talks with other poets, dead and living, he has no interest in movements, manifestoes, mots d'ordre...