SOURCE: "Theodore Roethke," in Connoisseurs of Chaos: Ideas of Order in Modern American Poetry, The Macmillan Company, 1965, pp. 219-45.

Donoghue is an Irish-born educator and literary critic. In his study The Arts without Mystery (1984), he attacks the tendency of contemporary societies to reduce art to a commodity. In the following essay, Donoghue perceives Roethke's poetry as an attempt to discern order and purpose in a world that may seem meaningless.

There is a poem called "Snake" in which Theodore Roethke describes a young snake turning and drawing away and then says:

 I felt my slow blood warm.
I longed to be that thing,
The pure, sensuous form.

And I may be, some time. 

To aspire to a condition of purity higher than any available in the human world is a common urge. Poets often give this condition as a pure, sensuous form, nothing if not itself and nothing...