Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic by Jay Parini (review)

252 Western American Literature to this book, it is toward the inseparability of subject and object, land and speaker, until it can be said that Haines fulfills William Carlos Williams’s dream to “reconcile the people and the stones.” Not every poem in this collection is first-rate. Some, such as “The Rain Glass” and “The Mirror,” are so steeped in particulars that they are unable to expand out of their original groundwork of imagery. In others such as “In the Middle of America” Haines bails out too quickly with summarizing images that fail to bring the poems to either their rightful conclusions or their rightful points of departure. At their best, however, the poems of News From The Glacier — so quiet and dignified, so distilled to their purest moment — reach the essential clarity that we ask of our best literature. Under their deep resonant voice, the poetic terrain changes, gradually and with assuredness, toward self-scrutiny and the honest governing of the self. ROBERT HEDIN Winston-Salem, North Carolina Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic. By Jay Parini. (Amherst: Uni­ versity of Massachusetts Press, 1979. 197 pages, $13.50.) The thesis of this book, that Romanticism and its metaphor of the plant underlie Roethke’s poetry, is introduced by the green paper jacket over the green cloth binding and its illustration of “the greenhouse Eden . . . the poet’s subject, the central image of his work . . .” (page x). Approximately, the bulk of the book contains discussions of Roethke’s poems as they fit the Romantic tradition and its American visionary aspects. It traces the path laid for him by contemporary mentors and other writers as well as by the Romantic masters. The analysis moves chronologically and is packed with references. While a delight to scholars, these become dense and may prove stumbling blocks for the general reader who simply loves Roethke. In the first chapter are six consecutive sentences with references, respectively, to The Odyssey, Dante, Blake, Milton, Wordsworth and Yeats, and the critic Harold Bloom. In the following paragraph Circe and Calypso enter. This stiff lacing of allusions may be overreaching; however, the book is a valuable one and with the poetics of other scholars provides a veritable anthology of critiques of the poems. Parini shows Roethke’s reliance on Emerson, Wordsworth, Coleridge and others to substantiate the Romantic connection. The author also includes generous quotes from Roethke’s poems as well as four full pages of excerpts from his notebooks. In Roethke’s notes Plato, Boehme, Buber and Tillich appear as influences and the Elizabethan poets, as well as Whitman, Blake, Yeats and others, are confirmed as models. Freud and Jung are also among those whom Roethke read. Parini takes special note of Roethke’s attention to Evelyn Underhill’ssteps in the progress of consciousness and includes Norman L. Brown’s suggestion that psychoanalysis completes the Romantic revolution. Reviews 253 While some still consider this “poet of madness” a confessional poet, the confessional categorization is ignored in favor of Roethke’s broader affinities with the Romantics. In Roethke’s attempt to bring together analysis and art, personal elements of the unconscious are framed by a larger mythic pattern, particularly in The Lost Son which is central to understanding the body of Roethke’s work. Parini, himself a poet, is worth quoting here: “It is as if the poet placed a sheet of rice paper over the archetypal pattern of a face, but drew his own features into the portrait” (page 84). The final chapter opens with a quote from Nietzsche, copied by Roethke in his notebooks: “To have paced out the whole circumference of modern consciousness, to have explored every one of its recesses — this is my ambition, my torture and my bliss.” This book show to what degree Roethke accom­ plished this, how he read, absorbed and incorporated into hiswork the Roman­ tics, modern psychology and the work of many mystics and poets. The book is more than a study of Roethke’s poetry. Although lacking a concise chronolgy, it includes previously unpublished letters, notes and drafts of poems. It also serves as a handbook for today’spoets. Scholars, writers and general readers should find their esteem and...