As if haunted by a raging dark angel

by

Herbert Leibowitz

Theodore Roethke had a singular, almost fanatical fidelity to poetry. Like Dylan Thomas, he “drank his own blood, ate of his own marrow to get at some of the material of his poems.” The unfolding of his lyric genius was slow, harried, stumbling, but irreversible. In the greenhouse of childhood memories — a jungle and a paradise he called it — he discovered his lifelong subject matter: the mysterious shooting out of green life from the rich and rank fetor of dying.

From “The Lost Son” to “The Far Field” he wrote poems of an imperious and unnerving need, as though haunted by some raging “dark angel” in his mind and pulled by Invisible undertows to the edge of nonbeing. He was uncannily alive to, and attracted by, a dark kingdom of slugs, molds, worms and stones where the will was nearly extinguished. Yet he was as attentive as Thoreau at Walden Pond to the swelling bud. He would slide downward to “primeval sources” in order to leap upward into the “realm of pure song” where in mystical jubilation “all finite things reveal infinitude.” His spirit waited for the premonitory tremors that announced a resumption of motion, a waking to light and force.

Marguerite Blasingame

At his death in 1963 Roethke left 277 notebooks in which he had jotted down, for 20 years, fragments of verse, aphorisms, elliptical injunctions to himself, remarks about teaching poetry, reveries and random observations (surprisingly few and mild) about other poets. The notebooks evidently served Roethke as a verbal compost heap. He would on occasion raid it for lines and images and graft them onto his current work.

David Wagoner, the poet who selected and grouped the extracts that compose “Straw for the Fire,” suggests that Roethke didn't use the material because “he was sometimes dealing with material too painful to complete” and “he loved incompleteness, perhaps because it represented a promise that he would never exhaust himself.” In some of the passages of verse, there is a sense of the cadences and urgent themes, “the steady storm of correspondences,” that held him to the end of his career:

All things rolling away from me,

All shapes, all stones,

My face falling from itself,

Sunken like cratered snow,

My voice, lost, a lark

Grating like a jay.

As for you assassin of air,

Noise in the topmost tree,

Articulated despair,

The inhuman ecstasy:

My lament to the last; unloved...

More likely, though, the material did not meet Roethke's high artistic standards. For the melancholy fact is that there is very little here that is not more eloquently said in the “Collected Poems” and in “On the Poet and His Craft.” Wagoner imposes order on Roethke's anarchic entries, but the effect, even to an admirer of the poems, is exasperatingly tedious. Roethke's sense of humor, theatricality and burly charm vanish for long stretches.


What in the poems and essays is intense and deep, if somewhat narrow — his “love for the bottoms, the fell last roots of things” — is in the “Notebooks” flat‐footed: “I must learn that we must die.” “Intuition is one of our classic and great methods of learning.” “At least I have a sense of evil: that's more than most possess.” What is the purpose of exhuming such dull sayings?

The reader who turns to the “Notebooks” for help in unriddling Roethke the man who struggled for deliverance from himself will find only a scattering of clues. He is shy and oblique in talking about his childhood or disclosing his inner concerns. Nor do we learn how Roethke's poems grew out of such unpromising mulch, how such damp straw could ignite any fire. Perhaps it did. But to read these ramblings is to examine a torn papyrus and guess at its meanings. We need a study of Roethke's drafts and revisions that will trace and explain the leaps and advances of his imagination.

There is an intricate simplicity and directness to Roethke's finest lyrics and sequences—“I would with the fish, the blackening salmon, and the mad lemmings,” “I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,” (“Elegy for Jane”) In one entry in the “Notebooks” he declares “I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.” This is the truth he lived for. Poetry, his chaste goddess, could temporarily quell the insecurities of self, the fears and suffering, the anguished separateness and longing for oneness. 

Credits:  This article was originally published in 1972 in The New York Times; it has been edited slightly for clarity.