Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke (1908-63) is long enough gone yet still fervently enough revered to be pronounced one of the great American poets. He left behind 277 notebooks. Out of the fragments entered in them, he constructed his poems, but there is more than poem fodder in them, as Roethke's former student and colleague, David Wagoner, reveals in his arrangements of some of their contents into sequences or chapters of "Poetry" and "Prose," as he modestly calls the two batches of his assemblages. Prose, verse, and lots of one-liners that are by turns comic, reflective, reactive, philosophical, and more appear in both kinds of assemblage. Those denominated poetry are primarily concerned with the stuff of lyrical meditation--the world, time, death, love, beauty, God--whereas those called prose find Roethke ruminating on his vocations as poet and teacher. In the introduction, Wagoner imparts that Roethke greatly admired Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," and, indeed, there is a Blakean brilliance of paradox and image in these jottings. A gratifying addition to Roethke's canon and to American literature.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved