An ambition to find order through poetry is movingly apparent [in Roethke's last poems]. The poems read like last poems, attempts to integrate his themes and bring his vision to final statement. All seem preoccupied with the fear of death and the threat it poses to the validity and endurance of the self, a fear that was responsible for his continuous interest in mysticism. Completing "Meditations of an Old Woman" in 1958, he had probably become aware of what threatened to be a persistent dilemma—that his drive toward mystical ecstasy could prove to be a drive away from life. The "North American Sequence," as I read it, is a penitential act of reintegration with nature…. In this article, I wish to [show that] … Roethke sought to immerse himself in nature in order to find his personal regeneration there. With this emphasis, the "North American Sequence" becomes a poem of age and parting. Its theme is the need to find a way to accommodate the fact of death within an acceptable view of life. It is also the fulfillment of a long-standing ambition to come to terms with the American landscape, interior and exterior.
Throughout his poetry Roethke had written of the desire to encounter the exterior world without threat, without separation, and of the impossibility of doing so while the values of the conceptual mind persist, since the mind cannot enter wholly into nature without fearing that implicit in change is the specter of its own death. There were two alternatives: either withdrawal into abstract isolation in an attempt to move beyond body, time, and thought, or a deeper penetration into process and change until a vision of order and plenitude in nature was recovered. His "North American Sequence" is a final celebration of this second alternative; it is a search for the "imperishable quiet at the heart of form."… (pp. 765-66)
This is a free excerpt of 312 words. There are 3,043 words (approx.
10 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Roethke, Theodore 1908–1963: Critical Essay by Rosemary Sullivan Access Pass.
