Theodore Roethke Critical Essay | Critical Essay by W. H. Auden

Critical Essay by W. H. Auden

SOURCE: "Verse and the Times," in The Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. 23, No. 24, April 5, 1941, pp. 30-1.

Auden is recognized as one of the preeminent poets of the twentieth century. His poetry centers on moral issues and evidences strong political, social, and psychological orientations. In the following review, Auden hails Open House but expresses the opinion that Roethke needs to continue growing as a poet.

Both in life and art the human task is to create a necessary order out of an arbitrary chaos. A necessary order implies that the process of its creation is not itself arbitrary; one is not free to create any order one chooses. The order realized must, in fact, have been already latent in the chaos, so that successful creation is a process of discovery. As long as this remains latent and unconscious, conscious life must appear arbitrary; one grows up in...
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