If any interpretation of Theodore Roethke's poetry is to be meaningful, it must be made in light of his life. The sense of psychological guilt and spiritual alienation that began in childhood after his father's death was intensified in early adulthood by his struggles with periodic insanity. Consequently, by the time he reached middle age, Theodore Roethke was embroiled in an internal conflict that had been developing over a number of years, and the ordering of this inner chaos became the primary goal in his life, a goal which he sought through the introspection within his poetry.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Zurich, 1983. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 297-304).

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This dissertation argues that the midcentury period from 1945-1967 offers a distinct historical framework in American poetry that bears further study. This position counters most other literary history of this period wherein midcentury poets are divided into schools or coteries based on literary friendships and movements: the San Francisco Beats, the New York School, the Black Mountain poets, the Confessionals, the Black Arts poets, the Deep Image poets, and the New Critics, to invoke only the most prominent designations. Critics also typically share a reluctance to cross gender or racial lines in their conceptualizations of the period. Of the few books that survey this period as a whole, most propose the defining features of midcentury poetry as formal innovation (or lack thereof) and a renunciation of the past. By contrast, I argue that such divisions and limiting categories do not attend to some of the most important features of midcentury poetry. I suggest that midcentury poetry most often demonstrates a renewed interest in locating a particular identity in a specific place. To illustrate this point, I explore depictions of identity and place in the works of three poets who are rarely studied together, Gwendolyn Brooks, Theodore Roethke, and Elizabeth Bishop. Each chapter examines the changes in poets' careers by focusing on how the relationship between place and identity differs in their early and late work. I contend that the few generalizations we have about the trajectory of this period (that poets moved from using more traditional forms to more open forms, for example) are not entirely accurate and, even more, that the accounts that we have of the poets' individual careers could be enhanced by a comparison between their early and late depictions of identity and place. I argue that the concerted exploration of the intersection of place and identity calls for a reconsideration of midcentury poetry: not just the categories we have but the poets and poems we read.

"Edge Effects: Poetry, Place, and Spiritual Practices” focusses on the intersection of the environmental and religious imaginations in the work of five West Coast poets: Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hass, Denise Levertov, and Jan Zwicky. My research examines the selected poems for their reimagination of the sacred perceived through attachments to particular places. For these writers, poetry is a constitutive practice, part of a way of life that includes desire for wise participation in the more-than-human community. Taking into account the poets’ critical reflections and historical-cultural contexts, along with a range of critical and philosophical sources, the poetry is examined as a discursive spiritual exercise. It is seen as conjoined with other focal practices of place, notably meditative walking and attentive looking and listening under the influence of ecospiritual eros. My analysis attends to aesthetics of relinquishment, formal strategies employed to recognize and accept finitude and the non-anthropocentric nature of reality, along with the complementary aesthetics of affirmation, configuration of the goodness of the whole. I identify an orienting feature of West Coast place, particular to each poet, that recurs as a leitmotif for engagement of such aesthetics and related practices. In chapter one, I consider a group of Jeffers’s final poems as part of a project he designated “our De Natura,” attending especially to his affinity for stones and stars. In chapter two, I investigate both Roethke’s and Hass’s configurations of ecospiritual eros in accord with their fascination for flora, while in chapter three, I employ the concepts of “aura” and “resonance” to explicate Levertov’s meditations on the “coming and going” Mount Rainier-Tacoma and Zwicky’s reflective iterations of the sea. / Graduate / 2019-04-04