Volume 1, Number 4 · October 17, 1963
Theodore Roethke
By Stanley Kunitz
The poet of my generation who meant most to me, in his person and in his art, was Theodore Roethke. To say, in fact, 'poet of my generation' is to name him, Immediately after Eliot and Pound and Hart Crane and Stevens and William Carlos Williams, to mention only a handful, it was difficult to be taken seriously as a new American poet; for the title to 'the new poetry' was in the possession of a dynasty of extraordinary gifts and powers, not the least of which was its capacity for literary survival. When Roethke was a schoolboy in Michigan in the twenties, these poets born late in the nineteenth century had already 'arrived.' Today, in the general view, they are still the rebels and inventors beyond whom even a college course in contemporary literature scarcely dares to venture.
Feature, 2087 words
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