Theodore Roethke Read Online Free PDF Page B

manner, and exploit it to better advantage than you do here. If the editors have any intelligent reason for rejecting the poem, it may be that they are fighting shy of it on the ground of its conventional rhymes: desire-fire; shock-rock; mirth-birth; sky-die. It just misses breath-death, as it were, and is pretty trite…. And personally I am a little bothered by your monogamous adjective-noun combinations: six such combinations in the first eight lines, while each may be used advisedly, is a good deal to ask the reader to endure; or, if he can achieve such endurance, you condition him to a frame of mind which he has to throw off with a most violent wrench when he comes to “strange, impalpable fruit.” ( SP , p. 33)
    The correspondence between Roethke and Humphries in the thirties is touching; Roethke was shy, unsure of his own talent, eager for approval and genuinely constructive advice; Humphries was fatherly, meticulous in his criticism, always encouraging. He became the first in a long line of surrogate fathers which would include Kenneth Burke and Robert Heilman, and one of the many whom the poet would call “Pa.” One can see how Humphries candidly felt about his young friend in a 1935 letter to Ann Winslow, who was planning an anthology of younger poets and had questioned him about Roethke:
    As to Roethke in particular, I think what he writes is unusually sensitive, delicate, tentative, rather shy stuff. I could not, at this point, utter 300–500 profitable words about his writing unless I were to criticize his poems in the item rather than in the mass…. I should think it obvious that Roethke is nobody’s damn fool; what is less obvious is his capacity for full-toned and robust expression. That metaphysical-personal-Elizabethan vein cannot yield ore in-exhaustively. Techniquely, Roethke has a good deal to learn, and I suppose he knows it. If I am allowed to take down his pants in public, I might say, for one thing, that he should try to get along without adjectives for a while; for another—this seems to contradict the first—that it wouldn’t hurt, for practice, to play up the sensuous at the expense of the intellectual, and to show more concern with sound and less with image. And there is a trick of sustaining the energy of a poem; he hasn’t quite got this, always; sometimes condensation is needed, sometimes expansion. 6
    Looking back, we can see that Roethke learned several things from Humphries that would determine the later course of his work; if his first attempts at verse were overly intellectual, unmusical, and sluggish, his mature work shows none of these deficiencies. Indeed, as Blessing puts it: “In his great poems Roethke’s ‘meaning’ … is always a celebration of the dance of being, the energy of life.” 7
    Apart from friendship and sensible criticism, the best thing Humphries gave to Roethke was an introduction to Louise Bogan, whose poems the younger poet had loved for several years. She was to become his most personal counselor, extending her solicitude from his poems to his life in general. Much less formal than Humphries, her letters are variously scathing, witty, or affectionate, but always full of highly specific commentary on his work. One especially good letter of 1935 contains her critique of an early draft of “Open House,” the title poem of his first book. Examining the final version of the poem, it is possible to see how Roethke utilized Bogan’s advice to turn a hackneyed, dull poem into an nearly perfect lyric of its kind:
    Now to tackle your last lines:
    In language strict and pure
    I stop the lying mouth
    is perfect, really fine. But I don’t like lyric cry : it’s a cliche, as old Malcolm would say. And it seems to me what you need in the last line is a synonym for open or apparent , as opposed to the tongueless idea. A fine sounding word meaning apparent would, to my mind, bring the intensity