THE FAR FIELD

by Theodore Roethke ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 3, 1964

In the decade or so before his death last year, Roethke's reputation kept growing by leaps and bounds. Though he was not the brightest in his generation's galaxy -- Lowell and Berryman outshone him--he was its supreme lyricist, its finest visionary. This posthumous collection, his first since Words for the Wind, has poems as remarkable as any he has written, and two of them, In a Dark Time, and The Marrow, (in which he apparently foresaw his end), are works which seem dictated rather than composed (indeed Roethke himself hinted as much in a critical commentary elsewhere), filled as they are with a music-fearful, moving, noble- rarely heard in our hard-ige age. Though his experiences and emotions are of the American grain, Roethke was really a throwback to the Elizabethans on the one hand, to Blake and Yeats on the other. He suffered from chronic mental breakdowns (in a short piece he wryly observes: ""In Heaven, too/You'd be institutionalized""), yet the note he continually struck or sought was not negativistic, but a fiery affirmation of life, love and nature. Fiery but also gentle. For amidst the hunger, the strong sometimes savage beat of the lines, compassion for what Stanley Kunitz called ""a creature-world smaller and purer than his own,"" would always upsurge, transforming the demons Roethke was possessed by till the imagery and tone ended in a sort of sacramental act. A number of the poems here are grab-bag fill-ins, workshop vagaries. The best, however, are golden enough to make the concluding volume one his admirers- a group bound to augment over the years- will return to again and again.

Pub Date: July 3, 1964

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1964

Categories: NONFICTION