Theodore Roethke Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Thomas Gardner

Critical Essay by Thomas Gardner

SOURCE: "Far from the Crash of the Long Swell: Theodore Roethke's 'North American Sequence'," in Discovering Ourselves in Whitman: The Contemporary Long Poem, University of Illinois Press, 1989, pp. 78-98.

In the following essay, Gardner classifies Roethke's "North American Sequence" in the long poem genre and compares the method and style of the sequence to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," which Gardner perceives as a model of the American long poem.

Theodore Roethke shares with [John] Berryman and [Galway] Kinnell a commitment to [Walt] Whitman's embrace as a means of singing forth what is "in me" but "without name." "It is paradoxical," he writes in an essay on "establishing a personal identity," "that a very sharp sense of the being, the identity of some other being—and in some instances, even an inanimate thing—brings a corresponding heightening and awareness of one's own self…." For Roethke as well, that increased awareness is...
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