A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (350 pages)
Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Epigraph -- Contents -- Foreword -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- House, Field, Stones, and Stars: An Introduction -- Open House (1941) -- 1. "Open House": Prying and Potential in an Early Poem -- 2. "To My Sister" -- 3. "Beneath an Undivided Sky": Environmental Disorder and Human Passivity in "Interlude" -- 4. "Sharper on the Ear": "The Light Comes Brighter" and the Subtle Phenomena of Place -- 5. Smart Like Auden? "Lull" and "September 1, 1939" -- 6. Ironic Quest in "Highway: Michigan" -- 7. Movement through Space, Sound, and Time in "Night Journey" -- The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948) -- 8. "Cuttings" and "Cuttings (later)": Roethke's Minute Carnivals -- 9. All the Small, Unlovely Things: "Root Cellar" -- 10. Locating the Poet in "Weed Puller" -- 11. "Orchids": Undomesticating the Greenhouse -- 12. "Moss-Gathering" and Roethke's Romantic Child of Nature -- 13. The Storm of the Mind vs. Family and Machine in "Big Wind" -- 14. "Long Days under the Sloped Glass": Greenhouse Memories in "Transplanting" -- 15. "Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze" and the Sleeping Beauty Tale -- 16. Meter in "My Papa's Waltz" -- 17. Syntax and Diction in "Dolor" -- 18. Imagery and Abstraction in "Night Crow" -- 19. "The Lost Son": An Emotional Journey through the Landscapes of Loss -- 20. Respite for the Lost Son: "A Field of Light" -- Praise to the End! (1951) -- 21. Homegrown Cosmologies: Animism and Elegy in "Where Knock Is Open Wide" -- 22. "Give Way, Ye Gates" and Roethke's Praise to the End! Sequence -- THE WAKING (1953) -- 23. "The Visitant" -- 24. "Elegy for Jane": The Nature of Grief -- 25. Dancing "The Dance": Roethke's Poetics of Appropriation -- 26. Subduing Fear in "The Waking" -- Words for the Wind (1958) -- 27. Love, Selfhood, and Sublimation in "Words for the Wind". 28. Moving Circles in "I Knew a Woman" -- 29. "First Meditation" and Roethke's Career -- I Am! Says The Lamb (1961) -- 30. A Few Thousand Words on Theodore Roethke, Children's Poetry, and Three Poems Concerning Two Turtles (One of Whom Is Named Myrtle) -- The Far Field (1964) -- 31. "The Longing": Alienation, Place, and the Desire for Home -- 32. Spirit, Self, and Shorebirds: The Pacific Pastoral of "Meditation at Oyster River" -- 33. "Journey to the Interior," "The Longing," and the Search for a Definitive Text -- 34. Mnetha in "The Long Waters" -- 35. The Ecological Vision of "The Far Field" -- 36. Nature Mysticism in "The Rose" -- 37. "The Abyss": Finding the Next Life in This One -- 38. "Otto": An Insight into Roethke's Poetic Vision -- 39. "The Meadow Mouse": A Poem of Compassion -- 40. The Zoopoetics of "The Pike" -- 41. Roethke's Dark Society: Revisiting "In a Dark Time" -- 42. "I Am Not Yet Undone": Navigating the Journey from Life to Death in "Infirmity" -- 43. Symbolism and the Mystic's Way in "The Tree, the Bird" -- 44. "Once More, the Round": Roethke's Last Word -- Works Cited -- Notes on Contributors -- Index.
This timely and accessible companion to the work of twentieth-century American poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) gathers essays that illuminate his poetics, themes, and the contexts of his poems through the diverse critical approaches that have emerged in the past five decades.