Read Online Theodore Roethke by Jay Parini - Free Book Online

the “Lost Son” poems, the creative act became, for him, a kind of therapy, an incantation by which the poet sought to liberate himself from “the menace of ancestral eyes” ( CP , p. 4).
    The fourth and fifth sections of Open House reflect the immediate influence of W. H. Auden and are largely boring. Roethke would later become a tolerably good satirical poet, but the supposedly cutting poems here, like “My Dim-Wit Cousin,” are a poor excuse for poetry. The poems of social protest in the last section, full of wearisome abstractions, posturing, and cliché (“Ballad of the Clairvoyant Widow” is the worst) remind us that Roethke never possessed Auden’s capacity for manipulating ideas in poetry. And he knew this himself, as his notebooks show: “I like to think a thing part way through and feel the rest of the way…. Conceptual thinking is like believing in God—one wants to put it off as long as possible.” 11 This Romantic prejudice against conceptual thought has been discussed already, but here we can find one of the problems with Open House . Roethke was an intuitive poet who had not yet learned to trust his intuitions. His gradual drift toward mysticism, which culminates in The Far Field , parallels his withdrawal from abstract modes of thought. He understood this by 1944, when he wrote in his notebooks: “Mysticism has the desirability of requiring no sustained thinking; instead, a constancy of belief and the capacity for intuitive leaps.” 12
    But Roethke’s enchantment with Auden continued throughout his life; he said in his notebooks in 1945: “Auden, for all his cleverness and posturing and thumb-turning episcopality, is one of the true sources of life.” 13 Auden, who was best man at Roethke’s wedding, was one of his closest readers and critics; Auden’s insistence on sheer technical virtuosity, characteristic of his own work, had a lasting influence on Roethke. One can find many traces of Auden in Roethke: the idealized landscapes, the photographic aspect of his imagery, the colloquial phrasing assimilated into formal settings. But these were Auden’s gift to all poets writing in the thirties and forties. When Roethke comes too close to Auden, as in “Lull ( November, 1939 ) “—the result is more like parody than creative imitation:
    The winds of hatred blow
    Cold, cold across the flesh
    And chill the anxious heart;
    Intricate phobias grow
    From each malignant wish
    To spoil collective life.
    Now each man stands apart.
    ( CP , p. 31)
    Premonitions of war are followed by a final groping toward abstract summary:
    Reason embraces death,
    While out of frightened eyes
    Still stares the wish to love.
    The poem reads like a very rough draft of Auden’s famous “September 1, 1939.”
    One final poem of real interest in the book is the last, “Night Journey.” Roethke used as tight a form as before, but the theme is so much his own that echoes of other poets disappear; the poem re-creates the experience of traveling by sleeper across America:
    Now as the train bears west,
    Its rhythm rocks the earth.
    And from my Pullman berth
    I stare into the night
    While others take their rest.
    ( CP . p. 34)
    The clickety-clack trimeter suggests the rhythmical sway of the train. The poet’s eye catches “Bridges of iron lace, / A suddenness of trees, / Alap of mountain mist.” Here, Roethke, following Whitman, again fulfills Emerson’s prophesy that America would not wait long for a literature to celebrate its riches. Roethke ends his poem and book: “I stay up half the night / To see the land I love.”
    In a characteristically astute early review of Open House , Auden posed some crucial questions for Roethke:
    The only question which remains, and it concerns the poet rather than the reader, is: “Where is Mr. Roethke to go from here, having mastered with the help of Herrick, Marvell, and