A Critic's Piece by Peter Lattu

A Look at Theodore Roethke’s Poetry

"The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke" is still in print and often available at libraries. It is a rich and varied feast. It serves up the best as well as the rest.

From “Open House” I like Part II about the change of seasons. Roethke catches the “cannon crack” of the thawing river ice in “The Light Comes Brighter”. His long poem, “The Coming of the Cold”, has the feel of “late autumnal bloom” giving way to “a fine and bitter snow”. Herons and bats put in appearances in Part II. Roethke excels in writing about nature.

Roethke’s best is served up in the greenhouse poems in Part I of “The Lost Son and Other Poems”. His fame as a poet surely rests with these. Many admire “Root Cellar” where all manner of things germinate in dank darkness. Having tried to write a poem about orchids and failed, I found Roethke’s “Orchids” fascinating. His orchids sway “adder-mouthed” in our faces. “The Flower Dump”, full of the dead and dying, is presided over by “one tulip on top”. The greenhouse ladies in “Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartz” hover over Roethke when he is alone in bed. The gardening images conjured up in these poems tell us much about life, love, and loss as envisioned by Roethke.

After the greenhouse poems, the rest is anticlimax although worth the reading for the deft use of language. There are some nonsense poems. Late in the collection, a pike strikes memorably. Roethke’s longer poems tend to lag although they are engaging in spots. “The Lost Son”, for instance, picks up in Part 5 “it was beginning winter”. Roethke knows nature well and puts his best into describing it.

Seek out The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. The greenhouse poems alone make the search worthwhile. Savor the feast.

{Prose Piece by Peter Lattu, December 2008}