This study presents Theodore Roethke's technique in poetry first by examining his chief areas of concern as.a poet and critic, and then by analyzing the artistic creation of one of his chief works, The Lost Son and Other Poems. Roethke emphasized the role of intuition and the need for the poet to pursue the depths of his own feelings in his search for the material for his poetry. He also insisted that once the poet has control of the material, he must diligently attend to the task of creating a language most natural to the object being presented in the poem. These convictions about poetic technique led him to write short poems and to avoid the "great theme" or the "sweeping work." Hoethke's poetic process, therefore, results in poetry in which a single idea or theme grows in scope as he shapes each poem. The Lost Son and Other Poems presents a series of poems that provide evidence for such a process.The first chapter provides a general overview of Roethke's poetics found in his prose writings, his informal comments to colleagues and friends, and his life-long practice as a poet. It shows his major considerations as a critic of his own and others' poetry to be what poetry-is, what the subject matter for poetry should be, and how poetry is created. 1Roethke basically believed that poetry is feeling incorporated into form. He emphasized that the mind and emotions of the poet himself should provide the material for poetry. He showed how poetry results primarily from a strong reliance on the rhythms of the spoken language and from the poet's fidelity to consistency between the object being portrayed and the actual portrayal in the poem itself. Often, this type of poetry is necessarily dramatic, Roethke's favorite form for a poem. Chapter two explores how Roethke used his personal experience as the subject matter in creating a sequence in The Lost Son and Other Poems. The overall theme in the book is how growth elicits both pain and joy. The subject matter for each poem comes from a central character's memory, his imagination stimulating his memory, or solely from his imagination. This central character's attempt to integrate his personality into a mature understanding of his world results from his growing perception of the relation between the levels of existence and his past experiences as he recalls them. These experiences are the significant events that contributed to his growth into manhood. Hence, as the sequence progresses, the scope of the subject matter broadens until the central character can recognize, accept and understand the relatedness of all of existence and the correspondence between himself and his world.Chapter three shows Roethke's use of time determining point of view in the poems as the unifying element in the structure of the sequence as a whole. It shows how the sequence presents the central character's toward personal identity. He created rhythms for the shorter poemspsychotherapeutic experience through a portrayal of his growing involvement with deeply seated memories and emotions. The sequence dramatizes this experience in which the speaker in the poems probes back in time in order to go forward as a mature person. Such a process involves a gradual preoccupation with both conscious and subconscious memories. Roethke presents this process in the poetry through a careful manipulation of the central character's point of view as he describes either memory or experience.Chapter four analyzes how Hoethke used prosody to create the dramatic poetry for the experience described in the third chapter. It isolates the major techniques providing for his fidelity to the language accompanying the different stages in the central character's growthchiefly through attention to stress, word texture and some of the usual poetic sound devices. Prosody in these poems contribute to a mimetic accompaniment to the subject matter of the poem or to a representation of the emotions of the speaker. The same basic prosodic (effects are created in the four longer poems of the sequence; but in addition, Roethke used other devices involving rhythmical timing to dramatize the most intense aspects of the psychic experience.The study, therefore, contributes to an understanding of Theodore Roethke's method for writing poetry. It offers a close analysis of the major factors involved in. his particular poetic creation. The study of The Lost Son and Other Poems demonstrates both how he creates a poem and how he sequentially develops a difficult theme in a whole book of poems.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/180801 |
| Date | January 1972 |
| Creators | Simonetti, Francis A. |
| Contributors | Clifton, Lucile |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | i, 154 leaves ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
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