A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke.

• Author: Barillas, William.
• TeilnehmendeR: Hirsch, Edward.
• Place / Publishing House: Athens, OH : : Ohio University Press,, 2020.; Ã2020.
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (350 pages)

This timely and accessible companion to the work of twentieth-century American poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) gathers essays that illuminate his poetics, themes, and the contexts of his poems through the diverse critical approaches that have emerged in the past five decades.

Table of Contents

• Intro
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• House, Field, Stones, and Stars: An Introduction
• Open House (1941)
• 1. "Open House": Prying and Potential in an Early Poem
• 2. "To My Sister"
• 3. "Beneath an Undivided Sky": Environmental Disorder and Human Passivity in "Interlude"
• 4. "Sharper on the Ear": "The Light Comes Brighter" and the Subtle Phenomena of Place
• 5. Smart Like Auden? "Lull" and "September 1, 1939"
• 6. Ironic Quest in "Highway: Michigan"
• 7. Movement through Space, Sound, and Time in "Night Journey"
• The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)
• 8. "Cuttings" and "Cuttings (later)": Roethke's Minute Carnivals
• 9. All the Small, Unlovely Things: "Root Cellar"
• 10. Locating the Poet in "Weed Puller"
• 11. "Orchids": Undomesticating the Greenhouse
• 12. "Moss-Gathering" and Roethke's Romantic Child of Nature
• 13. The Storm of the Mind vs. Family and Machine in "Big Wind"
• 14. "Long Days under the Sloped Glass": Greenhouse Memories in "Transplanting"
• 15. "Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze" and the Sleeping Beauty Tale
• 16. Meter in "My Papa's Waltz"
• 17. Syntax and Diction in "Dolor"
• 18. Imagery and Abstraction in "Night Crow"
• 19. "The Lost Son": An Emotional Journey through the Landscapes of Loss
• 20. Respite for the Lost Son: "A Field of Light"
• Praise to the End! (1951)
• 21. Homegrown Cosmologies: Animism and Elegy in "Where Knock Is Open Wide"
• 22. "Give Way, Ye Gates" and Roethke's Praise to the End! Sequence
• THE WAKING (1953)
• 23. "The Visitant"
• 24. "Elegy for Jane": The Nature of Grief
• 25. Dancing "The Dance": Roethke's Poetics of Appropriation
• 26. Subduing Fear in "The Waking"
• Words for the Wind (1958)
• 27. Love, Selfhood, and Sublimation in "Words for the Wind".
• 28. Moving Circles in "I Knew a Woman"
• 29. "First Meditation" and Roethke's Career
• I Am! Says The Lamb (1961)
• 30. A Few Thousand Words on Theodore Roethke, Children's Poetry, and Three Poems Concerning Two Turtles (One of Whom Is Named Myrtle)
• The Far Field (1964)
• 31. "The Longing": Alienation, Place, and the Desire for Home
• 32. Spirit, Self, and Shorebirds: The Pacific Pastoral of "Meditation at Oyster River"
• 33. "Journey to the Interior," "The Longing," and the Search for a Definitive Text
• 34. Mnetha in "The Long Waters"
• 35. The Ecological Vision of "The Far Field"
• 36. Nature Mysticism in "The Rose"
• 37. "The Abyss": Finding the Next Life in This One
• 38. "Otto": An Insight into Roethke's Poetic Vision
• 39. "The Meadow Mouse": A Poem of Compassion
• 40. The Zoopoetics of "The Pike"
• 41. Roethke's Dark Society: Revisiting "In a Dark Time"
• 42. "I Am Not Yet Undone": Navigating the Journey from Life to Death in "Infirmity"
• 43. Symbolism and the Mystic's Way in "The Tree, the Bird"
• 44. "Once More, the Round": Roethke's Last Word
• Works Cited
• Notes on Contributors
• Index.