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Summary: Roethke?s Verse is Simply Mesmerizing..............
Review: ........how else can one describe the beautifully placed words of Theodore Roethke's poetry? I knew I was a Roethke fan from the day I first read "The Waking" and "My Papa's Waltz", and I'm now ever pleased that I picked up this complete collection of his poetry. Roethke's marvelous descriptions of what he is able to see and perceive has made him one of my favorite poets, rivaling my admiration for poets like Walt Whitman. His metaphors are stunning and original ("Orchids" will just carry you away) and his metered poems are technically perfect ("The Waking" is just music!). If you enjoy poetry, I urge you to introduce yourself or gain additional exposure to the brilliant, beautiful poetry of Theodore Roethke!
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Summary: Hypnotizing, mesmerizing, spellbinding... perfect.
Review: At first, I was heitant to delve into this author's work simply because I'd never heard of him in all my wide readings of poetry, both modern and old.
Don't make the same mistake I did. Roethke WILL NOT disappoint you. "The Lost Son" has become my new favourite poem, and this book goes with me perpetually, and will until I finish every line in it.
Exquisite.
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Summary: To guide and inform a life
Review: I have always been transfixed by this man's poetry. Roethke possessed a way of speaking in his poetry that was both confessional and deeply spiritual. He was beyond doubt one of the greatest American poets of the 20th Century. Some of his poems, like Journey to the Interior, The Far Field, The Lost Son, and so many others create an almost religious experience in the reader.Roethke suffered from bipolar disorder throughout most of his life, and this experience (extreme emotional ups and downs) colored his vision of the world around him. But there is no trace of self-pity, and no great emphasis on depression or death. Instead, love, time, age, and the mystery of life are the themes of his poetry. He saw life as a religious experience, and was essentially a pantheist at heart. This is a book to give as a gift to some Seeker, if you are lucky enough to know someone who fits into that category. It's a book to guide, inform, and heal a life.
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Summary: A Kingdom of Stinks and Sighs
Review: I love Roethke and I can't stop loving him. His words, phrases, rhythms, thoughts, feelings and meditations stick with me. I will go a year or two without reading his work, but he is still there shaping the way I see the world. His poetry occupies the same space in my mind as Brian Eno's transcendent work On Land. It's meditative, quiet, and joyful and yet, sweaty, ominous, and alarming, all at the same time. The Far Field (North American Sequence) incarnates this feeling for me. Roethke meditates on his own mortality (don't all poets?) and finds a vast encompassing love for life. A love not only for the "growing rose," but also, seemingly for the summer heat and the stench of dead buffalo, "their damp fur drying in the sun." He sees beauty in nature but also "redolent disorder" and he calls life "This ambush, this silence." I agree with him. Roethke proclaims a love for life which is similar to Nietzsche's concept of the Eternal Recurring. That is, he has learned to love life, the good and the evil, to such an extent that he would have it recur again and again, eternally. This kind of love is not a love for evil, rather it is a willingness to sit behind the window of one's pain and still look out and see the beauty. This takes great courage. Roethke's influences are obvious. What American poet could escape Whitman and his lineage, Thoreau, Henry Miller, etc.? I'm sure he read his fair share of Nietzsche. I also note, Roethke's style seems to have changed drastically towards the end of his life. I believe this was probably partly in reaction to the Beats. However, in my opinion he swallows the Beats whole and makes something new of them. Roethke's verse also periodically has the ring of Wallace Stevens, and sometimes Robert Frost. Some of his verses sound like bad seventies self-help schtick; "I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form," etc. I only go into these criticisms so I can make a larger point. Roethke's metaphors are sometimes, seemingly, larger than their implication, sometimes they are derivative, sometimes clunky. But, his work, for me, has an almost Biblical air to it. By this I mean his work resonates on a mythological level. His ideas are broad and go to the heart without ignoring the blood and stench of life. At the same time, yes, his ideas are broad, however, his details, while often being merely enumerative, are true. By this I mean, they come from a real eye roving across a real landscape. He is, at once, strange and familiar. I would hope that Academia would catch up with Roethke. It seems that he is being unfairly ignored.
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Summary: A comprehensive collection
Review: Roethke has been my favourite poet for 10 years. His simple, easy, beautiful style and witness to the natural things of this world, will appeal to people who enjoy the metaphysical things of life. Where leaves, trees, the sky, flowers, plants and every other facet of the natural world is highlighted in loving ways. This book is an extremely comprehensive collection of Ted's poetry.
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Summary: A 20th Century Giant!
Review: The most urgent reason for buying this collection is that it contains Roethke's "Words for the Wind"- the finest book of poems published in the twentieth century, and now scandalously out-of-print. Forget his alcoholism, his teaching career, the chronic progressive depression; the Reason for Theodore Roethke's life, and all of its meaning, is found forged in the extraordinary aggregate of poems called "Words for the Wind." "The Far Field" is a superb collection, and I treasure it, but it doesn't include "A Walk in Late Summer" with those eternal two lines "That dove's elaborate way of coming near/Reminds me I am dying with the year", nor does it include "The Waking", probably the single most insistent document of human courage ever confined to a mere villanelle. Yes, the entire collection under consideration here is more than worthy; what has this man ever written that does not remain an indelible part of one's everlasting consciousness, and indeed one's conscience? Yet, I insist, the truest treasure is deep within this collection. Go to the poems of "Words for the Wind"; there you will find the small, the infinite, the ineffacable lying still upon the pages, seeming for all the world like tracings on the pages of any book, yet in itself one of the supreme and living achievments of human endeavor, an art so unbearably pure that one's heaven is forever changed, and one's heart forever widened.
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Summary: Vivid Images, Precise Diction
Review: Theodore Roethke is a poet I discovered while reading an anthology in college as a freshman. Writing about a wide continuum of subjects that range from the natural landscape to the convoluted paths of love, Roethke's poems are compelling and still applicable to our time. However, he does have a tendency to be quite abstruse, especially in such poems as "Forcing House" and "O Lull Me, Lull Me." Roethke's persistent examination of nature and its meaning to him, though, is engaging and imaginative; it was my most favorite aspect of his poems. Take, for example, the following lines from "The Waking" (different than the vilanelle, this one is in The Lost Son): "And all the waters/ Of all the streams/ Sang in my veins/ That summer day." The poet's intricate observations, too, make his poetry powerful and a treat for the senses. If you are patient and don't mind reading his poems a few times over to get their jist, Roethke is for you.
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Summary: Gripping, Powerful Poetry!
Review: Theodore Roethke wrote poems of the body, of the earth, and of passion .... his great poems are here. One of my favorites is the extemely famous, "My Papa's Waltz," which is a masterful arrangement using rhyme and quatrains to great effect. This is outstanding poetry, and I recommend this book to everybody.
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Summary: Vivid Images, Precise Diction
Review: Theodore Roethke's poetry is obscure, confusing, sometimes nonsensical, often filled with inexplicable sexual imagery, from time to time impenetrable to the reader. However, in spite of, or perhaps because of, these things, Roethke is one of the finest American poets of the 20th century. This was a poet who wrote utterly nonpretentiously, putting together words for himself as much as for the world, writing to solve his own questions more than to show off to the reader that he had something to prove. Roethke was a keen observer of the links between the physical world and the metaphysical, and poems such as "Meditation at Oyster River" show a profound understanding of Man's place in Nature even in the mundane-ness of the life of the individual. Other pieces, such as his sequence "The Lost Son," link personal events to common human experience. Roethke is not an easy poet, but he deserves recognition for his style and observations, and I would recommend him to anyone who seeks good poetry.
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Summary: The collected poems of a careful observer
Review: Theodore Roethke's poetry is obscure, confusing, sometimes nonsensical, often filled with inexplicable sexual imagery, from time to time impenetrable to the reader. However, in spite of, or perhaps because of, these things, Roethke is one of the finest American poets of the 20th century. This was a poet who wrote utterly nonpretentiously, putting together words for himself as much as for the world, writing to solve his own questions more than to show off to the reader that he had something to prove. Roethke was a keen observer of the links between the physical world and the metaphysical, and poems such as "Meditation at Oyster River" show a profound understanding of Man's place in Nature even in the mundane-ness of the life of the individual. Other pieces, such as his sequence "The Lost Son," link personal events to common human experience. Roethke is not an easy poet, but he deserves recognition for his style and observations, and I would recommend him to anyone who seeks good poetry.
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