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Blake, a certain style of expression? How is he to develop it, to escape being confined to short and usually iambic lyrics?
    It is possible, I think, that Mr. Roethke is trusting too much to diction, to the poetic instrument itself to create order out of chaos. For poetry is only an instrument. It can be sharpened, but it cannot, by itself, widen the area of experience with which it deals. Poe was quite right in saying that an instrument in poetry alone can only produce short lyrics, but wrong, I think, in concluding from this that only short lyrics are poetry. It is possible that Mr. Roethke has read quite enough English poetry for a while, and should now read, not only the poetry of other cultures, but books that are neither poetry nor about poetry, for every artist must be like one of his own characters who “Cried at enemies undone, / And longed to feel the impact of defeat.” Otherwise, he may be in danger of certain experiences becoming compulsive, and either, like Emily Dickinson and A. E. Housman, playing more and more variations on an old theme, or like Rimbaud, of coming to the end of his experiences and ceasing to write. 14
    Fortunately, neither of these unhappy alternatives was realized. With ferocious energy, Roethke battled his way out of the corner where the aesthetics of Open House had left him, pushing his way at last into the open spaces of The Lost Son . Nobody, not even Roethke himself, could have guessed how good he would become, moving from style to style, dazzling his mentors. As he wrote in his notebooks: “The poem is a kind of death: it is finished, a complete, a comprehensive act. The better the poem, the more final the destruction.” 15

PART TWO THE RADICAL VISION

CHAPTER SEVEN THE GREENHOUSE POEMS
    We are always demanding a framework, a metaphor, a legend .
    Roethke, “Notebooks” (20 November 1943,)
    In particular, what is a greenhouse?
    Kenneth Burke
    In a seminal essay, “The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke,” Burke asks himself, “What is a greenhouse?” and suggests the following possibilities:
    It is not sheer nature, like a jungle; nor even regulated nature, like a formal garden. It is not the starkly unnatural, like a factory. Nor is it in those intermediate realms of institutional lore, systematic thanatopses, or convenient views of death, we find among the reliques of a natural history museum. Nor would it be like a metropolitan art gallery. It is like all of these only in the sense that it is a museum experience, and so an aspect of our late civilization. But there is a peculiar balance of the natural and unnatural in a greenhouse. All about one, the lovely, straining beings, visibly drawing sustenance from ultimate, invisible powers—in a silent blare of vitality—yet as morbid as the caged animals of a zoo. 1
    In many ways the greenhouse is an ideal symbol, embracing the central paradox of art: that art is not life, yet it must embody life. The earthly paradise of an artist has to be ordered, but it must somehow contain its opposite—chaos—within itself. Tension—the vital element in all art—arises out of conflict, and in Romantic theory the function of the imaginationis to effect a proper balance or reconciliation of opposites. The greenhouse, literally, provides just the right contrarieties: light against darkness, order against chaos, life against death. Roethke was lucky to inherit this potent symbol from his Michigan childhood.
    The first section of The Lost Son contains thirteen poems, plus the autobiographical vignette “Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze” which was added to the greenhouse poems in later editions. This sequence, says Louis Martz, is “one of the permanent achievements of modern poetry.” 2 These brief lyrics, all containing the image of a greenhouse at their centers, prepare the way for the longer, more difficult poems of the “Lost Son” sequence. The