Volume 7, Number 4 · September 22, 1966
Aboriginal Poet
By Denis Donoghue
Collected Poems
by Theodore Roethke
Doubleday, 274 pp., $5.95
Theodore Roethke: An Introduction to the Poetry
by Karl Malkoff
Columbia University, 235 pp., $6.75
Most of Roethke is now in the book-stores. On the Poet and His Craft came out last year, a volume of Roethke's essays containing a few good pieces and a lot of folly, rant, and spleen. And now the Collected Poems, the last harvest, I presume, all the poems deemed fit to print. The new book, arranged by Mrs. Roethke with the advice of Stanley Kunitz and Frank Jones, includes seventeen short poems now collected for the first time. But there are still some missing items; like 'The Advice,' published in the New Statesman three years ago and certainly a far better poem than many of the reliques now dug up from other magazines. Indeed, the poems collected here are not a revelation. If Roethke had thought them worthwhile he could have included them, presumably, in The Far Field or the earlier collections. Some of them were written thirty years ago and are interesting only as accessories before the fact of real achievement. Other poems were put aside, I imagine, because they were merely trial balloons or variations on a theme already in print. In 'The Changeling' Roethke says:
Review, 2046 words
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