Biography Essay

The motif of the journey is more crucial to the poetry of Theodore Roethke than to that of any other major American poet since Whitman. Perhaps it is more important to Roethke. Certainly it is more coherent. Whereas Whitman's journey, if it can be called that, is outward, in all directions, until the fragmented poet achieves reintegration by becoming the cosmos itself, Roethke's is a simple journey from beginning to destination. But to say that it is simple is not to imply that it is easy. The journey, as it is recorded in The Collected Poems (1966), is that of a modern-day Pilgrim's Progress, fraught with its own temptations of vanity and pride, its own sloughs of despond. But Roethke's journey is essentially more difficult. For Christian in Pilgrim's Progress there is a road, worn, and thus defined, by those who have gone before him, and always...