Theodore Roethke

[sixsmith]

I'm currently reading Roethke's Collected Poems and I find it hard to disagree with the assertion that Roethke, though undeniably talented, struggled to locate and sustain his own poetic voice. That is to say, much of his poetry is terribly derivative. His most persistent impediment, at least from The Lost Son onward, appears to be Eliot (see 'The Shape of the Fire'), though one regularly finds him knocking off Auden and Yeats. It seems to me that his most original and best work came in his later collections, The Far Field and Words for the Wind. I'm particularly fond of 'I Knew A Woman', in which Roethke's complex and playful structure accentuates the intricacies of his heroine.

That said, I do find a small number of his earlier poems compelling. For example, while I grow tired of his greenhouse preoccupation (I now despise the word ‘loam’ and its derivatives), I find the oft anthologised 'Root Cellar' to be a powerful representation of life amongst death, in which Roethke's evocation of sex energizes the rather obvious metaphor. I think he is generally at his best in the shorter poems, perhaps because they allow less room for his artistic uncertainty to take hold.

I wonder what others think? Any Roethke fans out there?